In this world jammed with likes, comments, and followers that just stick around you virtually. Where notifications bring more happiness than doorbells, we have transformed as human beings. It has become imperative for this generation of the digital world to showcase their happiness and sorrows to the world so distant yet so close to them, their digital universe. It is a tradition to post a birthday wish on media platforms and the notion of meeting someone and making them feel special on their big day is fading away.
We believe that it is more important to tell the world that we love or hate someone than just expressing ourselves to the right person. Digital media has made living more a public thing than a personal entity. The notion of living for ourselves is becoming non-existent. The idea of existence is only considered valid if you are sharing every moment of yours with people you might have never known. We want to own and fight for everything that certainly is not ours, but we fail to own our privacy when it comes to social media and the new media per say. We need privacy from the ones with whom we have shared our deepest secrets, our childhood and they may still be a part of our present life.
The disclaimer here is, we live on the misconception that these people are a hindrance to our privacy. We need a separate room where we can do things at our own pace but we cannot afford to find privacy in this havoc of digitization. We want to hide realities from the real world and flaunt only the glittering part to this virtual community.
We have become those who would only be willing to show our happy-go-lucky life moments to our digital family and keep aside the heartfelt emotions in the corner of our hearts. We just want to keep those private so that no one ever knows what is our actual self. We might not accept but the digital network enters the most proximate spaces and challenges the normally accepted notions of private. In the times where we believe that after buying this particular subscription, I might become the owner of the digital content, the answer is NO.
You are mistaken if you are thinking along these lines because the reality is that you are not “buying” or “owning” the content, you are simply “licensing” the right to view the content and your access can be revoked at any time. In the digital age where it is tough to authenticate that we own our social media accounts, which are created using our personal information it lives through the realities we create in it, still, we all know we are not the real owners.
Data is the heart of the digital revolution, this data is your identity, but there is no question of ownership or privacy when it comes to this vicious cycle of data collection. The rigorous and intensive collection of our data which is collected for hundreds and thousands of reasons along with the inherent advantages of the new media technologies have spawned the skeptical idea of the existence of PRIVACY as dead!