Member-only story
The Diary of a Social Media Ghost
My parents tended to be late adopters, so when everyone else was on the newest technology, I was a generation or two behind. When DVDs came out, I got a VHS player (finally). When MP3 players came out, I got a Walkman. I never really got the appeal of a lot of the “internet stuff” like MySpace because it took literally minutes to access with the 28.8K dialup we had in the age of cable.
When Facebook first became available at my school, I had absolutely no idea what it was or what to expect. From what people described, I thought it was something like a MySpace knockoff or a school specific forum; I honestly wasn’t sure, and neither were the people telling me about it. Facebook started blowing up everywhere and that was my first real encounter with social media.
Just like everyone else in my class, I was hooked. It was an always open window into the life of your friends and peers. You could interact with new people, keep in touch with friends easily, and all sorts of other things which you couldn’t do as easily with MySpace. Everyone had it within a few months.
No one thought of the privacy implications at first, they just kept putting more and more information on it. Facebook didn’t really trip any alarms for anyone but the tinfoil hat types until they changed their terms of service. I quickly pulled my account when that happened, and…
