Social Media.
Understand That You Are So Easy to be Accessed
Well, you haven’t heard any of the stories being scientifically exposed by former journalists, scientists, futurists and technologists. They may understand you better than yourself, in fact, for what has been explained by Golbeck J. in her talk “ The curly fry conundrum : Why social media “likes” say more than you might think” presented to Ted Talks 2011. She gave the elaboration how possible it was as a social interactor progress on medias to actually carry on varying your actions or your future possibilities, personality and improvements based on only a factor. Your “Like” activity.
Not just that, have you ever heard of Face.com? A 2011 company established –a Tel Aviv-based tech platform for efficient and accurate facial recognition, over how many people?
18 billion faces worldwide.
Though, however, the company which has its source of people’s faces from Facebook, it clearly has a deal on having it sold to Facebook itself. This, is also an advantage of Facebook besides gaining profits and incomes basically from the users themselves. It’s like a basic approach on hacking besides the government laws on data citizens. They are freely to analyse you starting from the day you joined in.
To you your personal reference is not important to people? How can you be that sure?
How can you promise yourself you will be known by few when contributing your ideas to the world is significant to people accessing your life?
The world era which has been majorly based on the media since the last 2000 is viral to these acts we are currently involved in today. I can’t help but to say it is a contribution to several aspects –let’s not even talk about how limitless the possibilities are.
Our parents, grandparents or from older generations of your family have their profiles neatly kept in a box –photo albums, letters, journals or original formal profiles. But how about us?
We keep our profiles, data, everything on Cloud.
How can you not say this is scary?
Let me give you a simple recognition of your mistake here. Suppose in real life you make your friend upset due to being late for their birthday party, they are obviously upset with you. But you take this initiative to apologize to them straightly –buy them flowers or etc and the problem is over.
But how is it possible to delete every activity in your social media accounts? How much are you aware on whatever you post, you mention and you like, how confident are you that even if you hit the delete button, it’ll be permanently gone?
As described by Juan Enriquez in his talk given to Ted Talk on ‘Your Online Life, Permanent Tattoo’.
“Your Facebook, Twitter, linkedlin, cell phones, GPS, Foursquare, Travel Advisor, Easy Pass, security cameras, Wikipedia, credit cards, credit scores….those are electric tattoos. It lives longer than your body does”.
What Can They do With Our Actions in Social Media?
Innovation has been secretly kept in my veins as an interest. Though my course has nothing much to do with technology improvements or advanced tools of high tech, it is indeed a privilege to say that the impossible can be attained by the combination of your actions in social media and technology itself.
We can build robots. Real emotional robots. I know, it’s basically a common issue and development scientists and futurists are predicting the impact and improvements with their presence. But how it is to achieve that goal? It has nothing to do with you, you might say, but it is denied.
How can I proof that statement? It has been voiced out by Adam Ostrow in “After Your Final Status Update” in Ted Talk 2011.
Instead of having to test the intelligent mind of the brain to have it connected to the robot freshly, it is much easier to take an initiative to collect your previous actions in social media (which contributes to your personality, your behaviours, your future predictions and feelings) for the several years history data from Cloud and insert it to the robot.
Even it if not yet established or officially present today, may I highlight the message given by Ostrow A. himself has been told by the year 2011. 5 years ago. Now try thinking on how they’ve developed something far greater as they know that our actions on the social media is a huge factor and success for them to make a new life innovation –even without us gaining any profit.
Why You Should Limit Your Information in Social Accounts
After giving a long elaboration of these things –this isn’t a movie, they can access you within 45 seconds time with a single click. It’s not only scary, but you are letting people look and analyse you for free despite their abilities to detect your personality and etc, just by you clicking “like” as said above.
The person (Jennifer Golbeck) may assure you she is not a hacker in such terms on making a conclusion on your life through social media and would never make any harm, but she is a professor on this case and indeed her assistants are also an expert in analyzing every single detail in social media.
My point?
People (psychologists who are advanced in tech) are likely to take advantage of you without you even knowing.
I have social media accounts, in fact many especially (Twitter, Vsco, Facebook, Google+ that is connected with my phone, gmail, Microsoft and etc) it’s for the sake of your history loss prevention and entertainment. I understand very well, it can’t be prevented. But what I am saying is your unnecessary uploads –pictures of you, frequent tweets or even the slightest actions you take for granted “Likes”, it's a bad sign.
I am not forcing people to reconsider my thoughts on this as I deny to socialize myself in social medias on purpose but I have reasons on why should you focus more on your reality life than this.
On this point, as a Muslim, I am going to relate this to Islam frequent so I hope non-muslim readers would not mind as I have no time to separate it to my Islam context column.
“I’m doing this for the Future Me”
Hijrah (improvising yourself towards the better) is the aim of every human wants. As many may say, to change yourself is a long and hard task to accomplish. We always are haunted with stories stating that the problem when you are no longer the bad person you are once is the fact that people will remember your past and there is simply nothing you can do about it.
What does this have to do with your social accounts?
Based on personal preference in life, we are not yet qualified to be known as someone who is a good example for the society. Your mistakes in real life, they can be made amends and fixed, but to ‘hijrah’ for the sake of your future you, it’s not a choice to prevent yourself from any factors that can lead to your self -corruption.
If I had any social media accounts, the only hope I think is that “I want to reflect back my actions on social media to only smile instead of frown for my behaviour and the pictures I upload to let everyone see.”
I’ve scrolled my facebook account once, and trust me, I was horrified to see my past-self without shame posting status that uses such harsh words and those pictures (especially the free hair ones) and yet not have it to be deleted –but now do.
You know you’ve improved in life, but your past still haunts you and provides you a bad reputation –made by you yourself. Therefore either if you understand yourself or not to detect if you are on the right track, the best possible way is to not connect your life too much on the social medias. It’ll only show how obvious you are and also, worse, let others know who you are. In real life? That is the thing we should focus on when it comes to making amends of ourselves.
You Have No Idea When You Are Going to Die
Living the life of fame is wonderful, I get the feeling of it a lot. I understand the amount of followers that just increase intensely it just leads you to a higher confidence of appreciating yourself and the life you live for. It’s also wonderful to have yourself post pictures of you on social media that everyone would love to admire your way of making your appearance look nice and yet have a smart brain on academics. It’s good. But try thinking to another version. Try thinking if you die –and your accounts, the status, the pictures, etc, are all still there on the website.
For girls, try thinking that you, die at a young age at still have your pictures there for everyone to see and access? Do you think their praises and comments matter to you anymore?
I am not perfect. I do not cover my aurah’ properly. I’m just that typical girl who likes to dress up and gets super duper excited to buy clothes. I have about hundreds of selfies in my phone and I am very much interested in photography as well, but I take this initiative, this thinking, to not post much of my pictures in social media.
Though to become a better muslimah may acquire tons of sacrifices for a teenage soul to enjoy youth, at least we are avoiding anything that'll increase our sins free.
We all have sins. But as long as you can control them, try your best to do so.
Unless you are very sure you are able to focus on your life both reality and social media, then feel free to proceed
Most importantly, try to reconsider everything you do on social media. Remember this, control your actions for the sake of technologists taking advantage of you, hackers spoiling your reputation, you managing your life better for the future you who will succeed in life, and your benefit during afterlife.
