Privacy is dead, and we killed it.

As technology evolves, how someone can share their own life has multiplied by a million. Whether that be through TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, or Facebook, everyone’s an influencer nowadays. I wake up in the morning and by clicking on a single app, I have access to every moment of a stranger’s life within seconds.

Don’t get me wrong, I think that social media is amazing for a plethora of reasons, but I also strongly believe that privacy is a crucial part of life that should be protected. 

Celebrities have always been in the spotlight through paparazzi and magazine headlines but now we’re experiencing a publicity renaissance where people are choosing to share every aspect of their lives through social media. From the What I Eat in a Day video to questionably vulnerable Instagram pictures, nothing is off-limits when it comes to views and platform interaction.

I think this is ultimately a downfall of social media and society in general. When the line between public and private is blurred, there is no such thing as personal anymore. 

Births, deaths, illness, moments of celebration, failure, everything is now being normalized as post-worthy. I am not condemning those who post as a form of self-expression, I am simply saying that letting the world into a personal atmosphere takes away the sincerity of the human experience. It is a simple revelation that not everything needs to be posted, and not everything should be.

Some moments should be kept secret so that they can be cherished as a memory at that moment instead of documented in a digital footprint. 

There is this newfound pressure with the development of influencers to make everything fit under one aesthetic. I will be the first to say that not everything is pretty.

What a life looks like through an Instagram highlight may not be how a person lives their life. No one has their lives color-coded with background music. Life is messy and not always picture-perfect but isn’t this the Beauty of it? 

Influencer culture has glamorized life to a point where there is this pressure for everyone with an online presence to share their content with the world, but only if it is aesthetic. I believe there to be a huge issue with this not only because of the insincerity but because of the loss of identity it promotes.

If everyone wants to be Alix Earl, the diversity we worked so hard to maintain is being extinguished. I am all for establishing yourself as an individual, but the conformity the social media industry has caused is another reason I believe that privacy is being lost. 

When we talk about our private lives and share them with everyone, who’s to say that it’s even our lives anymore? Ideas, words, and thoughts cease to be ours to own when they get shared with the world. Without privacy, individuality cannot exist. Pictures are art and art is meant to be shared but nowhere does it say that they should always be shared in every moment.

Art depreciates when shared excessively. If there were 20,000 authentic Mona Lisa paintings, no one would make the extensive trip to the Louvre to see the one anymore.

Privacy is a crucial part of diversity and personality, without it, we don’t exist as a collection of individuals, instead, we conform to aesthetically focused robots. Let’s make life personal again by eliminating the selfie movement and starting a new era of valued privacy.