To be or not to be: a story of life with technology

In the midst of one of my many social media breaks, I realized something new about Instagram that went beyond the basic privacy concerns of social media: Instagram keeps you logged in, even after you delete the app.

Previously, Instagram required users to log back into their accounts when redownloading the application. This is because deleting an app from an Apple device also deleted all of the data and documents that were stored in it — or so I thought.

It turns out that while deleting an app does delete any data and documents stored on the device, it does not delete data and documents of that app that are stored in the device’s iCloud account. So, while my iCloud account does not have space to store my contacts, music, and photos, it does have space to store the data Instagram holds on me.

I will not lie; this discovery of mine has me conflicted. On one end, the frictionless login of this social media app provides me, as a user, the most accessible, direct path to the information I seek. Yet, on the other hand, I ethically wrestle with the disappearance of the threshold drawn between online and offline. As described by Floridi in Ethics After the Information Revolution, “the increasing re-ontologization of artefacts and of whole (social) environments suggests that soon it will be difficult to understand what life was like in predigital times.”

Have big tech companies made our access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) too easy? Has the process of switching between the physical and digital worlds become too frictionless?

All in all, it is no secret that Instagram (among other social media corporations) has been working towards building the most addictive form of social media; frictionless, data-storing logins just happened to be a building block to their endgame. But, the real dilemma lies in Floridi’s concern about the reliance of humanity on ICTs; on the creation of a world where the “divorce between physis and techne would be utterly disastrous both for our welfare and for the well-being of our habitat” (Floridi). Have we already reached this reality Floridi describes? My very redownloading of Instagram tells me ‘yes’, but my desire for social media breaks at all sheds light on a more hopeful future.