Online Visibility? How much can others find out about you? edit
Every time you go online and post a picture, share a website with your friends or like something you share information with other people. How far does this information go, is it really just your friends that get the information or are you far more visible than you think? How aware are we about this visibility?
What has an important effect on visibility now is being able to be online all the time and everywhere. It’s always around “the corner” and it makes it easier to quickly post something new or share something that you have just found.[1] So the act of posting, liking or sharing something is more accessible than it was before. This also influences how intense you think about it before sharing it with several people; you are more likely to share something if you can just do it quickly over your phone instead of getting out your laptop, maybe you even have to wait until you are home, log onto a platform, search for a picture and then decide if you even want to share it. Therefore I would argue that an always-on culture makes us more visible online.
I like to think that I am very aware of what I post and share, I am trying to only share information with friends and people close to me, choosing all my privacy settings to be as private as possible. What I share with others also depends on the platform, which probably is similar for other people as well. I only share certain things on one platform and other information on another, also sharing different degrees of private and intimate things. So for example, on Facebook I share pictures of myself and with others with friends, on Tumblr I show the fandoms I am in and communicate with others in the same fandoms but I do not share personal information about how old I am or what I look like for example, on Instagram I share photos of landscapes etc. I took from places I have visited. Even though I am trying to not give too many information about myself on each of the platforms themselves, taking the information I share on all platforms together I am probably more visible than I would like to be.
Of course our information online is not only visible for us and our friends, but it is automatically (we agree to this when we have an account for most platforms as they have this in their terms and conditions) visible for companies to analyse our data. The databases are used in order to create social identities for advertising the right things to us.[2]
Platforms do give a few options to limit your visibility; however there is still a great deal that is in the open. In the end you are the one that decides what to share and consequently also how visible you are.
- ^ Boyd, D. (2012). Participating in the always-on lifestyle. In M. Mandiberg (Ed.), The Social Media Reader (pp. 71-76). NY: New York University Press.
- ^ Miller, V., (2011), ‘Everyone is Watching’: Privacy and Surveillance in Digital Life. In Understanding Digital Culture. (pp. 111-133). London: SAGE Publications Ltd.