As shocking as it seems, I’ve discovered recently that there’s members of my family who deliberately don’t want to be online. Siblings, Extended Family, they are all in the early to mid 20′s so far, and see an ‘online’ profile as a waste of time. They don’t want their pictures online, they don’t want to have an online profile, they don’t want to be found online, period.
It’s interesting that in a time when increasingly more kids are online, and more people are connected to each other, that some people deliberately don’t want their lives online. The reasons differ… For some it’s just privacy, wanting to be able to keep their personal life private. For some, it’s to avoid having their images plastered all over the internet. For others still, it’s the desire to not waste time, endlessly being wasted in mindless games on platforms like Facebook, and wasting time on social networks, when they can spend their time being more productive doing other things.
I think the combination of lack of knowledge and increasing levels of blunders in the public domain, in the UK make people even more uncomfortable with the scale of online visibility that’s possible with a single picture. Not everyone is as open, and or as comfortable as I am in sharing themself so openly and publicly. I guess being part of the family, I have to respect their wishes to not be plastered all over the internet. But then, that does beg the question, morally who gets to choose which photos go online and which ones don’t? I could just take the self-righteous approach, and say that any photos that I’ve taken, I’ve automatically got the right to do with what I want. But then that’s just bound to start stirring up trouble within the family, and to be honest, I would much rather stay on solid terms with my family than worry about what photos I can and can’t show of my family. After all, photos on the internet are temporary, whilst family is blood, and that bond matters to me more.
How about you? Do you ever have your spouse wishing you didn’t blog about family life online? Or do you have kids or extended family that doesn’t want to be the object of your blogging? Would love to hear some of your thoughts/feedback and comments and insights, either in the comments below, or as a trackback from your own blog post addressing this question/issue..
October 15, 2009 at 2:59 pm |
I don’t blog under my real name – currently – because neither my husband nor I want potential employers to immediately associate my blog with us. It’s not that we’re afraid of lost opportunities (anyone who wouldn’t hire one of us ’cause I blog about intercultural relationships is not an employer I’d want to work for anyways), but we just don’t want the immediate connection. That’s not the first thing I want an employer knowing about me.
That being said, I do want to start another blog at some point under my own name. I think it’s very important to manage your online presence. People who don’t want their lives “out there” on the internet aren’t, frankly, going to have their wish fulfilled. There’s still going to be information and data about you online. So you need to be proactive & manage what is known about you, in my view. Ignoring that our society is becoming more transparent isn’t going to change the fact that it is.