Controlling Our Narratives: Privacy and Online Posting
In 2020, it seems humans are more willing than ever to post their lives on the Internet. Major social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are online spaces where people feel comfortable sharing anything from what they ate for dinner last night to how badly they wish to quit their jobs to their recent diagnosis for clinical depression. While it might feel good in the moment for us to get a funny tweet out or post a cute picture, every now and then some celebrity or politician pops up in our news feeds because they are being held accountable for some old status updates or “funny” pictures that are now recognized as controversial. Some people might be okay with criticizing the social media activity of figures in the public eye, but they would feel uncomfortable to be judged by the content of their own online profiles, with some pictures and posts dating back a decade or older. Once we post information on social media, it goes from private to public forever. Yet knowing that, we are still willing to sacrifice personal privacy in our lives in order to share our lives.
Despite the consistent flow of articles from major news sources like The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC, etc. that spread fear about the disappearance of online privacy, we still dare to overshare. There are many articles that focus on what we lose when we decide to post online, but this blog post is not a rehash of the same story. The fear based narratives that surround social media may never go away, but we can explore the “why” of online posting. When we trade away the rights to our privacy, what are we gaining? The answer:
Control Over Our Online Identities
Digital media linguists have done many studies on how we carefully craft our status updates and flood our feeds with photos to develop and maintain desirable presentations of ourselves. When we go online to post and share, we perform our various identities. We use social media to write ourselves into this world through our profiles and posts. We can also create multiple identities by using different social media platforms to show different parts of how we want others to perceive our lives. On Instagram, for example, you might only ever post pictures that are professionally edited and filtered on your feed and you might only ever share stories about having an exciting day climbing mountains or attending music festivals. The identity that you are then creating through your Instagram is one that says, “Hello Followers! I always look great and I always have fun!” Every post that you make on Instagram then reenforces the narrative that you have created for yourself. However, on Facebook you may solely use your status updates to repost old memes from your favorite meme pages and to like your grandma’s post when she writes “Happy Birthday” on your timeline every year. While it may not appear that you are creating another identity of yourself on this platform because you do not put as much effort into Facebook as you put into your Instagram, you are still doing identity work and creating an online presentation of yourself because your profile is public and not private.
In managing our online presences, we create many small narratives that add to our larger stories. Ruth Page, an English professor at the University of Leicester once said that viewing the ‘human activity of storytelling as a way of presenting and making sense of ourselves and others (accomplishing identity work)” is a part of viewing “storytelling as situated practice (and hence as interactive), rather than a static text.” Page also did research studying the small stories that people tell through their Facebook updates. On social media we are a part of this storytelling process described with every post we make. Whether we know it or not, we look to these small stories to make our lives appear more whole. We constantly share notes about our lives so that we may believe that we are noteworthy.
I understand why I continue to post on social media despite being wary that my privacy will be violated by an online platform or that my posts will get commented on by trolls. Choosing what I want to share is a form of control that I can exercise. It would be a privacy violation if that control was taken away from me if someone were to post information about me without my consent. While I can control the information that I share about me, I have no control over a large part of my digital footprint that will always exist on the Internet. There will always be some information that others have shared about me without my consent. It is important for me to do identity work through creating and publishing my own content to build a representation of myself that I can choose for my online presence. Trading away some of my personal privacy is the sacrifice that I make for the bit of personal freedom and power that comes with being able to post whatever I want on the Internet at any time.
We are afraid of others violating our personal privacy, but we are more afraid of losing control over our narratives and being forgotten. It is why we go ahead and share the picture or send the tweet anyway. Sharing and micro-blogging our life stories in posts on different social media platforms restores a sense of power to us, the users of the Internet, in an age when it seems like everyone wants us to be terrified of where technology is taking the world. The fear based narratives from the big news websites and journalists tell us to stop posting so much on social media as if that will somehow save our privacy from the clutches of the large and looming corporations. But we know that living in fear of a future privacy violation is not living at all. Instead, we can try our best to prepare our profiles with care and manage our online identities with attention so that if a negative attack comes our way online, or someone tries to misrepresent us, then we can rebut those stories with our own content. Then, hey, we can post about that too.