Generation ‘Share’ knows nothing about privacy

It used to be that when one wanted to keep a conversation private all they had to do was shut the door, when one felt strong enough about a memory it was locked in a drawer and when moments were utterly precious they were appreciated instead of being documented for future enjoyment.

Those days are long gone, for the private generation is dwindling to make way for generation ‘share’. It is evolutionary I suppose, but with all the moments, memories and conversations being streamed, beamed and uploaded into clouds has the idea of privacy been mutilated? Slashed at and cut through by the hands of all the Tweeters, Instagramers and Snapchatters out there?

Having to explain to a child of today, who has learned to swipe before they can speak, that certain aspects of a person’s life must remain private for the preservation of one’s sanity is almost frivolous. At one point in time privacy was so sacred that the world agreed to make it a fundamental human right, we agreed then we forgot. The need for privacy is a universal human condition that is essential to the growth process of a human being yet somehow our obsession with sharing has blinded us to the most human of behaviours.

It used to be that the world had to come up with ingenious ploys to pry information out of our clenched hands. Privacy pirates even resorted to reverse psychology deploying efforts to convince us that having access to our information is in fact for our own safety. No schemes needed now for we divulge all without a care in the world, without a moment’s thought, because life is not lived if it’s not being shared.

Steve Jobs’ Apple Inc. was recently under fire for refusing to unlock and extract data from an iPhone at the request of the FBI. While the debate raged on whether or not Apple should adhere to the FBI request most people did not really care whether or not a company could hack into their personal devices and retrieve any information they wanted and more of them believed it was being done already! Let’s face it, nobody ever reads those lengthy privacy agreements and none of us really know what we are accepting when we eagerly click the ‘I Agree’ option on any of these products. We do that not because we are incapable of reading but rather because the lure of technology is such that it has made us indifferent about our once revered privacy.

The messaging service WhatsApp, which has been operating since 2010, has only last week assured its one billion users that their “private” conversations have now become “safe”. What that means for us users is that six years’ worth of private, intimate or critical information have been up for grabs to anyone, to WhatsApp’s defence they do mention that in their privacy agreement which of course none of us have read.

The question here is not whether or not companies are keeping our data secure once they have acquired it but rather do we really care if they are? Because in a world where one is identified and rewarded not by their productive input but rather for how much of their private lives they are willing to reveal, the more you share the more you become. And so it is inevitable that the day has come when we write about privacy with such nostalgia, analysing it as we would some unearthed fossil of a creature our human eyes had never fallen on. Our children might never understand why their parents’ conversations should not be broadcast and that their future selves would probably regret publishing every thought that ran through their young heads because privacy is a concept that must be relearned in an age where it has become a currency that cannot be cashed.

This article was first published in The Gulf Today newspaper on 17 April, 2016  http://bit.ly/1p8cWEb

Arabic version of this article appeared in Al Khaleej newspaper http://bit.ly/1SmLQHl

The Cyber Cemetery: A virtual headstone for each one of us

IF you can imagine a world before the Internet you would picture a place where your thoughts belonged to you alone, a world that is governed solely by your physical presence. To be heard in this world you were required to prove you had something worth listening to and only if you were talented enough, well versed enough and committed enough would your thoughts garner an audience. Through this meticulous journey towards making your voice heard you must have weighed and measured every word before it was uttered, every action before it manifested. Through this examination of one’s self you would’ve eventually etched your legacy, one that will remain long after you have gone. 

If this virgin world seems more like fiction than reality, you are probably one of the many who have grown accustomed to the ease with which sharing your every passing thought with the world has become. These thoughts will never know the struggle of being caged and your voice will never feel the strain of continuous shouting. This schizophrenic world requires us to live in two separate spaces, one physical and the other cyber. Many of us fail to make the connection between the two, losing ourselves in this newly formed identity we choose to project. In this world where I sit at my desk writing these words, people die, they pass on, people are mortal. In the cyber world we inhabit they do not. The immortality of one’s social media persona is real, for we leave behind years of comments, images and interactions that can never be taken back.

According to a report recently released by the research firm Internet Monitor, dead users of the social media world will soon outnumber those of the living. It estimates that at the moment there are some 20 million Facebook profiles that belong to people who have passed on. Through social media one becomes immortal, he continues to be. 

These sobering figures are worth reflecting upon if only to reassess our online footprint. Does the social media persona you control reflect how you want to be remembered? 

The spontaneity with which we tend to share our musings with the world makes our online person more prone to spreading hasty generalisations and at times even hateful comments. The false security the glaring screen provides allows us to let our ugliness through. And the fact that this haste, hate and ugliness will remain floating through cyber space long after you are able to defend it is reason enough to make us take a step back from our keyboards and smartphones. 

After meeting many of my social media friends in the world of the tangible I can safely say that for some, their online personas do not do justice to their real life selves. I have come to realise that the most critical of the social media accounts are the least verbal in real life and I can assure you that most social media trolls have no physical troll land to dwell.

As this cyber cemetery grows bloated with people’s endless thoughts, existing in a virtual limbo, we must do ourselves justice and try as best we can to be true to who we are. We must find a balance between our real selves and our cyber ones for, like it or not, it is the legacy we will leave behind. Make it one that you wish to be remembered by, one you would be proud of for it will be the shrine your loved ones will visit when their longing for you becomes at its heaviest. 

Your words will continue to live, make them count. 

This article was first published in The Gulf Today Newspaper, March 10, 2015  http://bit.ly/18x2SMN

Arabic version of this article was published in Al Khaleej Newspaper http://bit.ly/18x30fn

The Secular State of Social Networks

Never before has the world been as interconnected as it is today. Entire populations all tangled up in an invisible web, one that holds them captive indefinitely. Each virtual string binds one stranger to the other making friends of some and foes of the rest. The virtual world where people feel safe under the false security of illuminated screens has provided the lonely being with a mirage, one that promises at the end of it the fulfilling sense of closeness and the death of loneliness.  

Virtual connections have stripped bare the essence of love songs, for no longer does one have to climb the highest mountain or brave the desert sands to be with the ones they love. A click of a button and a swipe of a screen will just about do it today. While the feelings of love have been subdued by the world of the virtual being, those of hatred have been amplified.

Those inhabiting social network sites have followed other inhabitants or created a following of their own, unconsciously forming virtual communities that speak the same language as they do. All of a sudden a lonely person’s thoughts are being reinforced by many other voices, suddenly a once ludicrous idea seems logical. Communities, even virtual ones, mean borders, boundaries, gates and armies. When thoughts are challenged, when lines are crossed, threats are issued and armies are deployed — such is the world we live in and such is the world we created online.

As much as people longed to believe that this world, created not of brick and mortar but of ones and zeros, will be the place where all voices shall be equal the reality is, a world is just a reflection of its inhabitants. The social network community is a place where codes of conduct do not exist, where people live without a governing law. A world that is an experiment in freedom, but freedom in the wild can get ugly.

The world of social networks lured the voiceless in with the gift of speech. It promised that voices, no matter how soft-spoken, would be heard. This granted wish soon revealed that not all voices have something to say and instead of a world of voices set free we experienced a world filled mostly with noise.

Angry voices grew louder filling the vastness of the virtual world, criticism turned to spite and a cold war between communities began. Those with spite lead a slew of their followers towards unsuspecting targets bombarding them with an onslaught of hate-filled words and accusations. Complete strangers enter into a war of words over the most trivial of subjects, imagine getting into a street fight but instead of a few spectators, there are millions. In this lawless but free world hate crimes are committed every day, it seems out of all the freedoms we prefer the freedom to hurt the most.

The virtual world was meant to be the great escape from the segregation that the real world imposed yet no sooner have they settled in than people managed to make a secular world out of the virtual. Freedom is required in a civilised world but so are the sense of social responsibility, fear of reprimand and respect for your fellow man, all of which the inhabitants of Twitter and Facebook seem to have left behind during their migration from the world of the tangible.

This world promised a place for everybody but it is not a place for everyone. Many loathed the falseness of it all and opted out, chose not to dwell in a place where many hide behind false avatars and speak in tongues that are not theirs. Where groups and sects are more prominent than any other place in the world.

After years of trying to make it a better place they understood that its ugliness was far more powerful than its beauty and committed social network suicide, deactivating their accounts and saying goodbye to it all. This is one choice the virtual world offers that the real world might not, to walk away when it all just gets too much.

To deactivate, disconnect, be free.

This article was published in The Gulf Today newspaper on April 1st, 2012.

Arabic version of this article was published in Al Khaleej newspaper April 1st, 2012: http://bit.ly/H5nD20

Too much Twitter

A few days ago I posted this statement on my Twitter account: 

“Most used term this year, social media. I’ve about had it! And yes I realise the irony of tweeting this statement so don’t even.” 

We have been reading about the social media ever since its inception but after it has somehow been given all credit for the revolutions happening in the Middle East, social media has become the subject of the year. Endless debates and analyses of websites such as Facebook and Twitter’s role in the Arab revolutions flooded the region drowning other important elements in its wake, hence my Twitter outburst.

Yes, the social media sites have aided in exposing parts of the revolution that governments tried relentlessly to keep hidden and a Facebook page might have set a revolution in motion, but those were nothing but tools used in the building of a national dream. 

Believe it or not revolutions did take place prior to Facebook. 

In 1952 Egypt there was no ‘Free Officer’s Movement’s’ Facebook page calling to overthrow the British backed monarchy. Gandhi’s non-cooperative movement did not ‘tweet’ about its struggle with ending the British rule in India. Neither Castro nor Guevara uploaded videos of their forest march to Cuba onto Youtube and although there was no live-stream of Martin Luther King Jr. from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the entire world still heard his dream. 

Throughout history revolutions did take place and ruthless governments have been overthrown. So before we go overboard in giving credit to the social media we should evaluate what it really did for today’s revolutions. 

Social media sites did not create these revolutions they merely advertised them, in the same way pamphlets and underground newsletters did in the past. They are a medium, granted they have a wider reach, but they are a medium nonetheless. Credit for the revolutions must always be given to the people and the people alone, they are whom we need to be debating and analysing in this case not Zuckerburg’s Facebook and Dorsey’s Twitter.

The exaggerated attention given to social media sites has resulted in an infatuation that has led users to believing that their existence on them is more important than their existence in the real world.

A social media site is designed to make you believe that the more followers you have the more important you ought to be. Therefore, the more followers you have the higher the need becomes to retain them. Every user is given the opportunity to become a critic and many have seized it.

Some users act like politicians running for the Twitter presidency, addressing certain sections of the world, hashtagging, re-tweeting and monitoring fluctuations in their followers’ numbers. Contrary to what our Twitter users/politicians believe the reality of social media remains that you gain followers and you lose them. You really do not need to be developing alter egos to better suit your cyber world persona. It’s not science, it’s Twitter.

To our social media addicts I pose a question: “If a tree falls outside of Twitter, does it make a sound?” 

If you took time mulling this question over then, in the immortal words of Tyra Banks, congratulations you are in the running to becoming Twitter’s next top user. 

Indeed the numbers might be pointing towards a life lived solely through the social media but statistics do not always reflect the ways of the world. There are indeed millions using these sites but there are billions of people walking this earth who are not. Of the many activists that have taken to Twitter and Facebook during the Middle Eastern revolutions hundreds have died on the streets with no social media account to their names. 

The question is are we being led to believe that if some people choose not to be on such websites that we should neglect their actual existence? 

If they are writers do we not read their works? If they are politicians do we not hear their views?  If they are activists do we not pay attention to their cause? Do we leave them behind while we set sail on our fancy boat of modernity, christened ‘Social Media’?

The term social media is in fact an oxymoron for there is nothing social about this media. There is nothing socially satisfying about tweeting to no one in particular. It is not a revolution, it is just a way for us to vent out and hope that someone in the cyber world is listening to what no one in our real world actually wants to.

This article was published in The Gulf Today newspaper on 12th June, 2011.