“Loughborough?! How does it know where we are? I don’t like that.”
Having just overheard this from my flatmates, I couldn’t think of a more appropriate time for this article!
Life for Millennials revolves around social media. Everyone wants and almost needs to know what everyone is doing in their day-to-day life, across a number of platforms. But Facebook seems to be the one true leader in the domain.
It’s more bizarre to not have a Facebook profile nowadays, which is quite scary. In a world where this generation lives through the online, it’s easy to forget how much of ourselves we’re exposing. You can share where you are, who you’re with, how you’re feeling, where you’re eating and even let people know that you have voted. Is that really necessary? Sometimes, location is inadvertently shared to online ‘friends’ which is just blatantly abusing someone’s privacy. Why does it matter? It seems like Facebook is becoming more like Big Brother every day. But people will still use it.
Uploading photos is a great way to share your memories and safely have them stored, if you were to wipe your hard drive clean, for example. You can keep people updated with what you’re up to, especially if you’re half way across the world and want to keep in touch. But when people upload photos of people’s weddings and their precious, first photos of their baby – is this just ruining these unique, special moments? Not only Facebook, but apps like Instagram stain the idea of concrete, good old fashioned photo albums. They seem almost obsolete and an inconvenience to have now, which is a sad shame.
Facebook is like the drunk equivalent of your LinkedIn profile. All your information is there, but there will always be the horrendous tagged photos, the cringey statuses and your personal ‘likes’ and interests for the internet to keep forever.
Personally, I think Facebook (and not forgetting social media generally) has become very intrusive. The fact that anyone can search for you is daunting, particularly if it’s a potential employer or partner’s parents you’re yet to meet. Anyone can have a stalk of your profile and know a lot more than you’d like of yourself without having even met before. And with all the personal information it holds, it’s relatively easy for your account to be hacked, too.Weird, but what’s new? It’s very relevant still, but something we often forget.
Nevertheless, the world has never been better at communicating. What would we actually do without Facebook now? It is more than a social media platform, with its new ‘Groups’ function, this makes it much more easier to organise committees, special arrangements, find events and so on. Facebook and various other social media apps may be intrusive, but now they’re invaluable more than ever.
