The transaction was a simple one: a cell phone upgrade at a local AT&T store.
The guy behind the counter looked overworked and disinterested. The transaction transpires; I skim through pages of a legal document on an iPad impatiently and end up signing my name on the digital terms of agreement like always. Scary, but true.
He hands me the old phone and says robotically, “I’m going to let you hit the big red ‘erase all’ button to make sure it’s wiped clean of all your personal information and then ‘refresh’”
Fair enough, but as I tap the button, one question echoes in my mind: It is really that simple?
From that one little device, yes, all my photos, emails, old texts and apps disappeared, but let’s consider what truly remains in cyber space of that personal information the clerk mentioned so nonchalantly.
Instagram houses the pictures of everything from past vacations to flowers from a suitor to food that just looked too damn delicious to not be filtered in Lo-fi.
Tweets hover on the Internet from my bipolar twitter account that is half medical stories I find interesting and half dumb observations (I lose followers quicker than the average person loses IQ points watching the Kardashians).
Photos and dramatic bulletins from my adolescence are plastered all over a MySpace account that I can’t delete. Google image search your name and I bet you find a distasteful 6th grade photo that some mysterious person saved from your MySpace profile. Pretty terrifying, eh?
Do I dare touch Facebook? I often find myself wondering what memories I would chose to share with someone I just met if they couldn’t just scroll through a photo-by-photo timeline of my life since I was 15. Consider this: Do you even own most of your memories at this point or have they become public domain?
There’s the notion that once you’re in college or “an adult” that you can’t just put up nonsense photos of your absurd debauchery on the web and that you need to protect your social media persona. Your potential employer is watching! But at the same time, what is the point of posting and saving only your censored memories? I don’t want to look back at that timeline and watch myself age in the same pose with my hand on my hip.
Statuses have changed from moment by moment updates like “Just had a Starbucks soy latte! Omg so good. Omg coffee” to song lyrics expressing how people secretly (but actually very publicly) feel, to the current state of media sharing (c’mon, you know you read the GainesvilleScene articles I post) and the occasional declaration of opinions that disintegrate into half-hearted and ill-informed arguments. If you saw your newsfeed after the Zimmerman trial verdict of not guilty yesterday, then you understand what I mean.
Furthermore, have you noticed that people actually get angry when people attempt to form opinions on the happenings of our society via social media? Vitriolic statuses like “Wow, everyone must be an expert on the criminal justice system now!” pop up and show that way less anger and impatience existed when people wrote about their daily cup of coffee. It is a strange phenomenon that as we get older and more mature, we attempt to stifle the maturing of our social networks. We want to keep it dumb and superficial. Why?
I ask this: what age is old enough to decipher what’s too much to display online? Our country stresses the importance of reaching a certain age before you can exercise good judgment for the purpose of your own safety; laws exist on the age you can drive, the age you can drink, the age you can gamble, the age you can buy cigarettes, the age you can legally have sex and the age range in which that sex is appropriate, etc., etc. What about safety on the Internet?
Even now, I look back and cringe at what I decided was appropriate to launch into the abyss of the World Wide Web. But at that age, I could never fully grasp what it meant to have my life on display. I can’t even say I fully grasp it now.
Via: footage.shutterstock.com
As the new generations grow up with a tablet in one hand and a rattle in the other (or just a rattle app for the iPad), how do you control the urge of the youngsters to broadcast their lives from the very start? Especially when their parents are the ones too busy Vine-ing the kid’s first steps to actually experience the monumental milestone.
It’s easy to keep hurtling through your days with your mini computer glued to your hand. You can push away the unsettling thoughts about your real digital footprint in favor of incessantly checking “likes” on Instagram.
Ignorance is bliss, they say, but as the first generation to grow up hand in hand with social media, we have the responsibility of asking the tough questions and analyzing the implications of our technological addictions.
Go ahead, wait patiently for the iPhone 8, but remember, there’s no “erase all” button on the memories you’ve scattered throughout cyber space and there is no “refresh” button on the life you’ve missed while uploading.
Photo courtesy of: iphoneantidote.com
