Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
Key Takeaways
- Initially, social media like Facebook connected friends and family, fostering genuine relationships.
- Over time, the focus shifted from personal sharing to creating visibility and building audiences.
- Many people, especially women, now share less and protect their privacy while using social media.
- The desire for intentional sharing grows, with many valuing private moments over public posts.
- Not everything in life requires an audience; some of the best experiences occur privately.
Table of contents
What I thought Facebook was for
I originally joined Facebook for the same reason most people did. I wanted to keep in touch with friends and family, not so much my close friends, but those friends that I still liked, but only saw once in a while.
It started with my favourite cousins – they are 9 and 12 years younger than me, so we didn’t exactly grow up together, and I had a family while they were still single, but it was still fun when we did get together. I heard they were using this new Facebook thing, and I thought it would be great for me to join in with the “cool young people”, so we could be in touch more frequently, and I could keep my mum informed of what they were doing. Facebook worked really well for that purpose, and I soon found other friends that I hadn’t spoken to in person for ages.
At the time, I had small children and we lived far away from most of our relatives, and this new “social media” felt like a wonderful invention. Instead of writing the same thing on 50 different Christmas cards, interspersed with occasional phone calls, we could share photographs, family news and the little everyday moments that make up ordinary life.
Back in those early days, social media was mostly photographs of children losing their front teeth, holiday snaps, birthday cakes and updates about what somebody had for dinner. We “poked” each other (if you don’t remember that, it was a way to say “hi” to someone) and played silly online co-operative games where you had to share things with your game buddies in order to advance.
Looking back, some of it was gloriously mundane and a bit silly, but that was part of its charm. We weren’t trying to impress anybody. We were simply sharing our lives with people we knew, like playground small talk with people who lived miles away.
Or at least, that was the original idea.
Somewhere along the way, social media stopped being about keeping up with family and friends and became something else entirely, especially for those of us who chose to run online businesses.
The rise of the Audience
When Facebook first appeared, most of us were sharing things with people we actually knew. School and university friends, distant relatives, work colleagues and neighbours, from all around the world, all gathered in one place. It felt like a digital extension of real life.
Over time, though, the platforms changed, and gradually the focus shifted away from connection and towards visibility.
We were no longer simply sharing our lives. We were encouraged to build audiences.
At first, this felt exciting. For bloggers and small business owners like me, social media created opportunities that had never existed before. Suddenly it was possible to connect with readers, promote your work and “meet” people from all over the world.
Many wonderful things came from that.
Back in the early days Facebook enforced a strict boundary – use your Facebook profile for your personal life, and if you are running a business, use Facebook pages and groups. I thought this was a really clever idea, especially when some of my real friends told me they didn’t want to hear about my online business stuff, and I did as I was told and kept the separation quite rigidly.
But somehow along the line, the rules got a bit blurred. Algorithms changed and a new generation of “influencers” appeared, for whom sharing the family stuff was their business. Many of them didn’t remember a time before the internet, and this just seemed normal to them. They started by sharing the real stuff, but with the rise of competition, this soon turned into performing what a perfect life should look like – just like the adverts on TV, but without the professional make-up artists, locations and directors.
One of the biggest shifts I have noticed over the years is the subtle pressure to turn ordinary life into content. A family day out becomes a photo opportunity, a holiday becomes material for social media, a hobby becomes a side hustle…
The internet started by inviting us to share our lives. Increasingly, it seems to expect us to package them, and serve them up to our “viewers”. As someone who has spent more than twenty years online, I can see how easy it is to slip into that mindset.
You begin taking photographs because you think your children and pets look cute, and you think your family would want to see them. Before long, you start viewing all your experiences through the lens of whether they are worth sharing, how many likes you would get, and you edit out the bloopers, even though those are often the funniest and most memorable photographs.
You find yourself wondering what caption you might write before you’ve fully enjoyed the moment itself.
That is a surprisingly strange way to live, but it can sneak up on you..
Learning from my children
I feel lucky now that I grew up and lived my young adulthood in an age where there were no digital cameras with unlimited memory. We only took one or two photos of each event, and only saw the developed pictures a few days afterwards, when it was too late to retake or do things differently. There aren’t too many embarrassing photos of me growing up, and those that do exist are in albums stored safely away, and are very unlikely to appear on the internet.
Digital photography certainly helped social media users curate their image, and then Photoshop and the other photo enhancers allowed users to post pictures where everything appears perfect.
Since I was raising my family and accepting gifts for my family in exchange for a blog post, I did join in with this trend towards curating a perfect life, for a while. Looking back, I am sure there were times when I shared more than I should have done. Nothing terrible, nothing dramatic, but there were occasions when my children gently pointed out that not every aspect of their lives needed to appear on the internet, and for the most part I listened to them and took their opinions into account.
I’m sure that I embarrassed them more than a few times. Like many parents of my generation, I was navigating completely new territory. We were the first generation raising children while social media grew up alongside them. Nobody really knew where the boundaries were.
Over the last few years my children have grown up and have far stronger opinions of what I may or may not post about them, and I absolutely respect that. And so, I have become more selective. Not because I had anything to hide, quite the opposite in fact.
I began to realise that some moments become more valuable when they belong only to the people who experienced them.
Not every achievement needs an audience.
Not every holiday needs documenting.
Not every family memory needs to become content.
The older I get, the more I appreciate that distinction.
Privacy is becoming a luxury.
When I was younger, privacy was largely the default setting. If somebody wanted to know what I was doing, they generally had to ask me. Now we carry cameras, microphones and internet connections in our pockets, and many of us voluntarily document large parts of our lives. The result is that privacy has become something we actively choose rather than something we automatically have.
Interconnected lives
Now when I go on Facebook, I still see my two favourite cousins. They have families of their own now. But I can also see the inner lives of a lot of people that I have met along the way in business and elsewhere.
It fascinates me how much we are encouraged to share nowadays. What we’re doing, what we’re thinking, what we’re buying, what we’re eating, where we’re going and who we’re with. It often feels as though the internet rewards visibility and treats privacy as something slightly old-fashioned.
Yet I increasingly sense the opposite happening. Many women seem to be quietly stepping back, not necessarily deleting social media, but sharing less, posting less and watching less. I don’t think this is because people have become anti-social. I think many of us are simply becoming more protective of our peace.
I certainly have cut down. I still keep the very firm separation between personal stuff on my profile and business stuff on my page (although the rules seem to have relaxed a bit for others).
To an outsider, my Facebook profile probably looks much more boring than it did ten years ago. There are fewer updates, fewer photographs and fewer glimpses into daily life. But that isn’t because my life has become less interesting. If anything, the opposite is true. I’ve simply become more selective about what belongs online and what belongs in real life.
Of course, the children have grown up and have their own lives now, and they don’t want to be photographed often, so they hardly ever feature any more. So, if you choose to follow me you will see a lot about my amazing choir, and I will continue to encourage everyone I know to come to our concerts, but you won’t be seeing what I had for breakfast this morning, or what brand of tea I like to use.
Final Thoughts
The older I get, the more I value being able to enjoy something without immediately feeling the need to post it or turn it into a story. I still take photos, but I keep most of them for myself.
Perhaps women are not falling out of love with social media. Perhaps we are simply becoming more intentional about how we use it. The internet has given us extraordinary opportunities to connect, learn and build businesses, and I am grateful for all of those things.
But after more than twenty years online, one lesson stands out.
Not everything needs an audience. Some of the best parts of life happen when nobody else is watching.
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