3 New Followers

With the introduction to modern social media in the late 1990’s, there have been hundreds of social networking websites that have popped up. Ranging from the ever popular art community of DeviantART to the video sharing website called YouTube. Social media has become incredibly addictive in this past decade. Many people check their accounts throughout the day, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. I can look around my college campus and there are always people scrolling through their newsfeeds and dashboards, waiting for their next class to start or for a friend to get out of class. In all honestly, many millennials, and even Generation X, are addicted to social media and don’t even look for a way out. It’s as if the people who run these sites are making their websites addictive so that we don’t want to find a means of escape.

With social media on the rise, it is getting hard to determine what should be private and what should be public. Many of the people I know have shared what they’re doing, where they’re going, and who they’re currently with. I can’t say much, because I do the same thing. I am guilty of taking pictures of my surrounding environment, whether it’s a busy mall or a crowded park, and update that I currently at Disney World or Outback Steakhouse or in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. This is one of the many ideas that Dave Eggers’ The Circle is trying to explain. Social media is starting to break down that wall of privacy in the real world, which plays along with the idea that “most of what we do here at the Circle is using social media to create a safer and saner world” in the novel.

Privacy is an idea that people would think would be almost like a necessity when it came to basic human rights and online assurance. I want to be able to know that my search history and possibly even my passwords aren’t being sold to some third party company. It would probably help me sleep a little better at night. In The Circle, though, privacy is barely even a thing, and is shunned as if it was three day old leftovers that has hardened up in its Tupperware container. No one really wants it, but you have that one weird family member that will still take it. We need to ask ourselves ‘When is a certain amount of information considered too much?’ An article by Kent Anderson, chief executive officer and publisher of the Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery, says that Facebook alone is a “major force in changing these social norms in its efforts to erode privacy to drive its business.” He says that Facebook argues that the social norms are changing, so they’re trying to adapt to the ‘new ways of the world’, yet they are also the ones driving privacy out the door. According to a research study from 2014, more than “more than 90% of all 12–17 year-olds use the Internet and 73% of adolescent Internet users spend time on social networking sites.” Even if parents try to tell children what to NOT share in the world of social media, we can’t trust them enough to listen to our warnings. I mean, I was definitely one of those kids that didn’t get their parents permission to go on Club Penguin and talk to complete strangers and have dance parties in my igloo. However, in 2015, the Obama administration unveiled a “Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights” as a part of a comprehensive blueprint to protect privacy rights, and give Internet users more control over how their personal information is handled. This initiative “seeks to protect all Americans from having their information misused by giving users new legal and technical tools to safeguard their privacy,” which allows American users the try and keep their personal information more private.

Social Media outlets, such as Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter, allow for a lot of information to slip through the cracks because people find it entertaining. With Facebook being popular among teens, it is hard to monoter what the post or share to their wall. “Can you truly delete entries from social networking sites with the confidence they no longer exist on a server somewhere? You cannot. And that is only your entry,” says Peter Bazalgette, chairman for Sony Pictures Television’s UK production business. The social media site have stated that they have privacy protection, but whatever you post on the internet leaves a digital footprint, even if you ‘delete’ it.

Many YouTubers are given the spotlight when it comes to sharing their day to day adventures online. There are so many different varieties inside the term “Daily Vlogger”, including reviewing, comedy, and even self-help vlogs. Tyler Oakley runs a pop culture channel that helps his viewers through struggles of their everyday lives, like coming out as gay to a friend or even simple beauty tips. He currently has a little over 8 million subscribers, and I admit to being one of those subscribers. Chadwick Moore, an editor for Out magazine and a metro for the New York Times, wrote an article about Oakley and interviewed him a few times to understand what exactly he does. Oakley stated that he’s open and honest with what he does, and doesn’t hold back.

“If you have your own voice, you should join YouTube and tell your own story,” Oakley tells the audience at Playlist Live. “You never know who is watching, or the ripple effect you might have by sharing your story. Somebody might find it and see themselves in just you, nobody else.”

The main reason that oversharing on social media like YouTube and Facebook could prove to be a big issue is because of how extremely popular these websites are. The Circle itself is a popular social media platform in the novel, and allows you to post videos, share posts, and livestream, like Facebook and Youtube. Depending on how interesting the activity depends on how many viewers Mae has. There is a part in the novel where Mae shows her viewers that a shark can completely devour a turtle, which causes her viewers to raise to about 42,000. Another time her viewer count skyrockets is when she’s in a meeting discussing the topic of transparency in politics, which has the interest of 7.2 million people.

In The Circle, there are ‘SeeChange’ cameras around every corner to make sure that the people of that world aren’t doing anything illegal. This system is actually starting to become very real in our world. In 2001, Tampa, FL decided to put up facial recognition cameras around Ybor City. Tom Kirchofer, a former reporter for The Boston Herald, states that the “system uses 36 cameras mounted above Ybor’s streets to grab digital snapshots of strollers and compare them electronically to a database of 30,000 mug shots of criminals, runaways or others.” People voiced their concerns almost immediately, asking if this is actually the right course of action, and do we really need Big Brother tracking our every move when we walk down the street.