Future implications of Social Media

We should prepare our children for the future ramifications of their online and social network behaviour!  As every action as an equal and opposite reaction. 

As technology and analysis techniques get more and more advanced, so do the chances that your online comments or posts will get analysed and affect your future. You can already get fired for something you say or do online.  Imagine what the future may hold.

Visualise in a few years; there will be an analytic application that will process every comment or post ever written by you online or your mouse clicking behaviour and the output will be your personality profile.   This may warn an employer not to go near you because of bulling behaviour, or tell a university you shouldn’t be in their top pick for Vet School because your pet bunny died of unusual causes when you were 7.  Or it might send a potential boyfriend running for the hills because of your internet stalking behaviour.  It could have all sorts of ramifications, to not only our future, but for our children’s futures.  

I am basically an old school social media user, I don’t post very often and mainly use it to follow other peoples lives and to laugh at crazy cat pictures.  The other day I looked at a younger social media user.  HOLY CRAP! Their every move is documented, every meal eaten, every walk taken every crazy night out recorded.  They no longer just enjoy life, they want the rest of the world to know that they enjoy their life too.  All good, whatever spins your wheels, but I think it’s important to remember that there is a cause and effect that we are only just now discovering.  This generation may be lost to a horrible online history of embarrassing photos online, but what will our kids do?  Can we warn them can we stop the inevitable from happening.  Children are using social media at younger and younger ages, ages where their brains aren’t equipped to think about future ramifications.  Ages where to be honest, they have trouble dealing with day to day social interactions let alone online interactions and the fact that their comments online will stay accessible forever.

I see future social media going two ways.  Once people realise how their information can be used for purposes they never intended, we will either get complete namelessness, or we will all be little branded fake people.  There will always be people that are anonymous and make nasty comments, but do we want everyone to be nameless and hold no responsibility for their actions?  Online branding also exists, but complete branding of everything said and put on the internet would just make us a completely fake world, with everyone trying to live up to impossible expectations.  

In Marketing 101 I learnt that not only companies have a brand but we also have a self-brand.  How we portray ourselves to the world is how we want the world to see us. In effect what we wear, how we look and how we act tells people something about us.    Without realising it we tend to online self-brand.  We only post the things we want others to see, for example, pictures of our best selves or smiling cute kids, we don’t often show ourselves at our worst or our children in the middle of a tantrum, because that’s not something we want others to see.  It’s bad enough that we had to deal with it, why would we share it, right?  What we don’t tend to brand is the comments we make to others, the things we click on to have a laugh at, the emoticon we use to like pictures, the little things that we may take no notice of. 

Because of this self-branding we need our children to know that what they see online like in magazines is probably fake or Photo shopped, probably trying to sell something and is defiantly not the whole story.  We need them to know its ok not to be perfect, that what they see of others’ lives isn’t perfection but 5% of that persons probably miserable life, the part they are willing to share.  We need to teach them to consciously think before they comment.  Don’t comment in anger or spite.  Comment as if your grandma was going to read it, because chances are she will be reading it.

I think we need to remind our children that their every move online can come and slap them in the face at a later date.  Bonus is maybe Karma will come and kick all those online bullies butts, who knows?  But what I do know is that we need to somehow teach them what we don’t actually know.  We don’t know the effect the social media will have on them, but we need to realise that all this valuable information isn’t just going to sit out there on the internet.  Someone will use it to their benefit.  After all it’s an analysers dream come true.  Believe me, I’m an Analyst, I know.