Dear reader, I have a shocking confession to kick off my new blog, I am being followed! Now before you become too preoccupied with my well being, I have to admit that you are being followed too, that is if like the vast majority of the modern world you are a slave to the social media behemoth.
If you like I are one of the 800 million active users of Facebook then you will no doubt be aware of the imminent change to the timeline profile. Initially an optional change, the boffins at Facebook HQ have taken it upon themselves to force the sites users into transferring to the new timeline style of social media communication.
Essentially after you have been forcibly made to accept Facebook’s latest facelift, all of those ludicrously embarrassing posts and pictures of years gone by will be readily available for one and all to take a gander at. As well as this in a more sinister Orwellian development, all of your previous movements on the site, such as check-ins and tagged photos will be mapped out for the great and the good to analyse. Facebook are basically making sure that you their humble user are more readily stalkable (not a real word, but you get the idea) than ever before. They are ensuring, that all of those private moments which you would prefer never saw the light of day again, (and more importantly never appeared before the eyes of your newest Facebook friend, the boss!) are difficult to keep under wraps.
Perhaps I am being melodramatic, perhaps this latest evolution of the world’s most popular communicative website will emerge as a shining beacon of all that is good in the modern world, but somehow I doubt it.
Social media is now an unrivalled force of formidable power and incomprehensible popularity. It has even been credited in some quarters as a defining trigger behind the revolutions the world came to know as the ‘Arab Spring’.
What I am trying to confer to the reader, is that now like never before communication is truly instant, which means that information about YOU is instant, information about the most private moments of your favourite artist/singer/sports person/model is also instant. Now I can hear the level headed amongst you saying “well, just don’t use it”, “don’t do those embarrassing things you are so keen to hide”. Whilst I accept the undisputable reasoning behind those arguments, that is just not life. We as human beings are fallible individuals, we get too drunk, and we pose for pictures which make us cringe and most of all we misbehave. The faults of human nature should not be held up for the entire world to see, unfortunately in a society which is mediatised to an extent never witnessed before that is simply not an option.
