No, this isn't a post about people like Donald Trump throwing tantrums on their social media accounts. I'm talking about babies in the more literal sense. A few years ago, say 2006, all of my friends suddenly hopped onto Facebook and stated sharing the funny and bizarre (and, yes, banal) details of their lives. It was all so innocent at first. We announced our political views in single-word statements. We told the world that our relationships were either official, or blithely stated that they were complicated. We even dared state our religious leanings. That was until the big social media hangover kicked in.
Flash to 2008. There was this huge rash of breakups among my circle of friends. Chalk it up to an age thing. A lot of people in their late twenties started to hear the passing years telling them things were either going nowhere with their partners or that they needed to be locked down more definitely. I noticed that, following the breakup wave, people stopped posting their relationship statuses until they were wither engaged or married. It was frankly embarrassing for people to have to announce their life disasters. We became wary.
This (somewhat arbitrary) moment gave many of us our first direct taste of the online privacy issues we'd been hearing so much about on Fox news (yeah right). I remember when I accidentally announced that my seven year relationship had ended (it was an accident because I didn't mean for the change to immediately go up on everyone's feeds). From such events, many of us experienced just how voyeuristic and invasive social media could be.
Now flash to 2011. Suddenly it seems like all of our friends are having kids, and we're preparing to hop on the bandwagon ourselves. But we've all been burned by over-sharing on our networks. Many of us have added at least a handful of vague, distant friends from our distant pasts, people we'd barely say hi to if we walked by them on the street. Do we really want these people seeing our kids? Maybe we're fine with posting a very select few photos here and there on the 'book, but what's to be done about all those unintended privacy consequences?
I wish there was an easy answer. The fact is, my kid's going to be so amazingly fantastic that it's going to be difficult not to share his life a little. I guess the smart thing to do is to manage what info gets out. Keep high privacy setting on your Facebook profile, choose who can see your albums, and use all of those acquaintance and list settings that are available if you're not sure about someone but aren't yet ready to completely sever the ties. If you're a bloggy-type, like me, be sure to protect your identity and not give out unnecessary details (mostly I just use first names, and though it would be easy enough to figure out who I am, it would be much more difficult to track anybody else that I've mentioned). Technology enables such a wonderful, rich, textured exchange of our lives, and it can connect us with like-minded individuals we'd historically have never had the chance to meet. It would be a shame to limit ourselves just because there's the possibility of a creep here or there. I suppose, as with may other things, it just boils down to knowing your personal limits and being smart about the way you interact with the world.
Flash to 2008. There was this huge rash of breakups among my circle of friends. Chalk it up to an age thing. A lot of people in their late twenties started to hear the passing years telling them things were either going nowhere with their partners or that they needed to be locked down more definitely. I noticed that, following the breakup wave, people stopped posting their relationship statuses until they were wither engaged or married. It was frankly embarrassing for people to have to announce their life disasters. We became wary.
This (somewhat arbitrary) moment gave many of us our first direct taste of the online privacy issues we'd been hearing so much about on Fox news (yeah right). I remember when I accidentally announced that my seven year relationship had ended (it was an accident because I didn't mean for the change to immediately go up on everyone's feeds). From such events, many of us experienced just how voyeuristic and invasive social media could be.
Now flash to 2011. Suddenly it seems like all of our friends are having kids, and we're preparing to hop on the bandwagon ourselves. But we've all been burned by over-sharing on our networks. Many of us have added at least a handful of vague, distant friends from our distant pasts, people we'd barely say hi to if we walked by them on the street. Do we really want these people seeing our kids? Maybe we're fine with posting a very select few photos here and there on the 'book, but what's to be done about all those unintended privacy consequences?
I wish there was an easy answer. The fact is, my kid's going to be so amazingly fantastic that it's going to be difficult not to share his life a little. I guess the smart thing to do is to manage what info gets out. Keep high privacy setting on your Facebook profile, choose who can see your albums, and use all of those acquaintance and list settings that are available if you're not sure about someone but aren't yet ready to completely sever the ties. If you're a bloggy-type, like me, be sure to protect your identity and not give out unnecessary details (mostly I just use first names, and though it would be easy enough to figure out who I am, it would be much more difficult to track anybody else that I've mentioned). Technology enables such a wonderful, rich, textured exchange of our lives, and it can connect us with like-minded individuals we'd historically have never had the chance to meet. It would be a shame to limit ourselves just because there's the possibility of a creep here or there. I suppose, as with may other things, it just boils down to knowing your personal limits and being smart about the way you interact with the world.
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