Anxiety and Social Media

What is intimacy without privacy? In the video below, Sherry Turkle (author of Alone Together) asks this question, and a follow-up question: what is democracy without privacy? Certainly one of the most cherished of our rights as U.S citizens, privacy is needed to maintain everything from relationships to businesses. Are we giving up this privacy as new forms of social media are becoming more prevalent in our society?   She points out that social media mogul Mark Zuckerberg has said that privacy may indeed be a thing of the past.

  I think that that issue of privacy contributes to to the overall anxiety that can come with social media sites like Facebook, and with younger generations of teenagers and children who are becoming more and more attached to their cell phones for services like texting. As we read in Alone Together, young people are becoming more and more concerned with the image that they present on Facebook, going so far as to create false accounts to talk to schoolmates about themselves to see if they are liked or disliked.

Anxiety plays a large role in maintaining this image. It has become common for teens and young adults to spend hours upon hours every week tweaking and updating their Facebook pages and checking their cell phones for updates on Facebook and recent texts.

 Anxiety also comes into play for college athletes a who are constantly worried about coaches or teammates viewing the pictures that they post, and for professionals concerned about their boss(s) checking up on their information and possibly demanding employee passwords to do so.

So since most of us assume that everything that we put on the internet is basically public and will remain so forever, like Turkle points out when describing the "Anxiety of Always", should we refrain from posting anything online ever? If a person can't judge between what you should and shouldn't put online for others to see, this may be the best route. And considering how addictive sites like Facebook can be, more and more people may be taking this route.