Technology

In high school I became the president of a community outreach club. Prior to that point, I had no social media accounts. At least, nothing we could call social media today. My tech-savvy father taught me the principle of "never tell anyone on the internet who you are, or where you live, or how old you are." I played games with online people who were likely much older than me, but they all seemingly followed that rule too, even if voice chat gave away my age. Nobody ever asked each other "A/S/L" etc.

The club supervisor however, insisted that I create a Facebook account. "Students don't communicate over email anymore," he said, "if you want the club members to know when an event is happening and verifying how many members will be attending, you need to set up a Facebook page for the club, and you need to administer that page." And it was true... to a point. I was also part of a robotics team that did mostly communicate via email, but we also had a Facebook page so team scouters could form alliances with other teams from neighboring schools. My supervisor and my parents both knew my account (not the credentials) so the account wasn't an unknown quantity.

In retrospect, neither of those approaches to social media were wrong per se, they were simply solutions to different problems: the problem of being a kid making friends on an internet full of adults, and of needing to reach out to real people and communicating and coordinating and cooperating with them.

To this day, I refuse to "connect" different accounts together so that no streams get crossed. But amoral corporations like Google and Facebook do not care about your privacy or your legal status - they want to know everything about you in order to market and advertise to you more effectively. It's an arms race of tying humans to accounts, and driving engagement: Age, Sex, Location, What Sites You Visit, What Programs You Run, What You Buy, Where You Read News, all of that is ammunition in the race. I don't envy parents nowadays, I can't imagine the scale of the problem where every kid has a smartphone and a dozen different accounts (or some all encompassing Google/FB single-signon) before they even reach high school.