Social Media is preventing you from keeping your personal life personal

Is social media making your private life not so private anymore? People constantly share their feelings and almost every aspect of their life on their Snapchats, Instagram's and even their Facebook's but would all of that information be in the public eye if it wasn’t for these social media sites? Who knows? All we know is that social media encourages people to post anything regarding their life and their feelings for the masses to see.

Cory Doctorow is a big believe in the idea that social media is preventing many people from having a personal life because their “personal life” is in the public eye. According to Doctorow,

“And then the more you embroider the account of your life, the more you disclose about your personal life.”

Essentially the point that Doctorow is trying to make is that people expose personal aspects of their life in order to attract more attention to themselves and to their social media pages. Without the personal details and drama that people bring to their social media pages, no one would show up and pay attention to it because most people are only interested personal, “juicy’ stories. This is why so many people are drawn to sharing so many personal aspects of their lives that would normally be kept private. They want to attect attention to themselves even if that means posting things that are personal to them.

Even though many people post their personal information solely based off of their decision, many of the social media sites that they post this information on seem to encourage that type of behavior. One of the most notable ones is Facebook and their feature that tells all your friends how your feeling today. If someone is not having such a great day and they post they are sad, people may start asking questions and then they are more likely to share personal details as to why they are so upset. So at the end of the day, personal information is starting to fade away mostly because these sites encourage people to expose everything about themselves

Link to a Ted Talk by Cory Doctorow that discusses this more in depth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAGjNe1YhMA&t=445s