Some weeks ago - after my return from The Grand Canyon - my Mother in Law sent me a text just checking in with how the hike had gone. I let her know it had gone well and had been an enjoyable experience for all involved.
The question surprised me a bit - I was sure at some point she and The Ravishing Mrs. TB had talked - but in her follow up, she noted that she looked forward to seeing pictures from the hike.
The reality was that - for the first time in a very long time - I had posted no pictures of my adventures on any social media platform.
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Our age - at least for certain age brackets - has become an age of complete openness. People share everything - their adventures, their meals, their gatherings, their emotions, their interests. In some ways these can be valuable things - especially the interests for example, where I have come to find I have common ground in certain things with individuals all over the world. The other side of it, of course, is that with this sharing comes a complete loss of privacy.
For some people, I can tell a great deal about their lives: where they live, what they enjoy, who their friends are, what beliefs they hold, some estimate of their income bracket - things that once upon a time were the sort of things that we had to gather by actually knowing someone.
Now, that information is almost thrown at us.
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Interestingly, there seems to be some kind of age differentiation in this. Na Clann's generation, at least in my immediate circle, seems to post infrequently or not at all (although that may simply be due to the fact that the platforms they might post on are the same their parents post on, and who wants that). The generation behind me and ahead of me seems to post much more frequently.
Or not. There is a whole slew of people I know in my own age bracket who post almost nothing.
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One of the great privileges of life is privacy: the simple idea that one has the right to lead one's life in one's own way without any requirement to have people intrude in it or know about it. This has often been a noticeable different between non-authoritarian/totalitarian and democratic/republican (note the non-capitalized letters there) governments: East Germany, for example, was famous for the government surveillance apparatus. China, or at least from what I read, employs a network that essentially tracks everything that you do (including how you spend your money). And North Korea - well, I cannot imagine a private moment there that somehow does not have government sanction.
One of the greatest privileges of life - and yet we now live in an age where such things are casually thrown to the wind.
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At one time I posted like everyone else. Do I think I will go back?
Probably not.
Part of it is simply that with a general retreat from Social Media, it is simply not something I do now - at least to the general public. There is a smaller group of my friends with whom I share such things, but really is that not the way it should be? Friends sharing with friends, not friends sharing with the entire world?
Will it "cost" me a few likes or having experiences that no-one else knows about? Yes. But ultimately, is not life an experiential event viewed from our own perspective or interpreted via ourselves through our lens? Far better to focus on processing those thoughts and experiences ourselves or with a few rather than sending them to the four corners of the Earth without thought.
