My Foray onto Facebook

Several years after the majority of my peers had launched their first social media profile, fear forced me onto Facebook. It was 2009. I was nineteen years old, a University student, and digital cameras at parties were fast becoming the norm.
 
Personally I never wanted to be on Facebook, and at times I’d worn that deviation from the status-quo like a cape. The reality, however, was not that I was too cool for social media, but that I found managing my real world identity difficult enough. I couldn’t fathom the thought of ‘being’ in more than one place, nor muster the energy that I perceived was required to jostle and build digital currency alongside my chronological one.
 
Increasingly, my peers would discuss images from recent parties, some of which I supposedly featured in, and would lament the fact that not only did I not know what they were referencing but that they couldn’t tag me in said photos. If I continued to refuse to join Facebook, some even threatened to launch and manage a ‘Lucy O’Connor’ profile on my behalf just so there would be a 'Lucy O'Connor' to tag.

When that didn't work to shift my stance, they stepped it up a level. A pointed rumour started to spread about there being images of me on Facebook in which I appeared ‘f*cking wasted’. This was University, remember, so appearing f*cking wasted in a photo was relatively high on the scale of possibility.

Time and peer pressure proved persuasive. After anxious deliberation, I decided it was better to know what images were being posted of me than to remain unaware of how I was being presented online in lieu of my explicit consent.
 
‘Yeah you got me’, read my first Facebook post, published in July, 2009. It only received one like, but in those days the thing to do was comment on Facebook walls:
 

‘givin into the darkside finally huh’
‘facebook? i thought youd never cave!’
‘ohh f*ck yes. bout time this young lassie joined the crayze!’
‘successssssssssss!’
 ‘good to see you are normal now and have facebook.’

 
It didn’t matter that the people who wrote these posts were close friends, classmates and even a house-mate who lived in the room next door - the sense that being on Facebook meant that I somehow further belonged was visceral and immediate. What stands out to me now is the awareness in those posts, that even in 2009, Facebook was already being described as ‘the darkside’ and ‘the crayze’, and that the reason people were excited about my profile was due to my submission.
 
It strikes me that across my eleven year tenure, my online presence has been defined by regulation. At the start, it felt better to know what images were being posted of me than to not. In the middle, while running my personal brand, it felt important to manufacture an identity that would fast-track my career. Now, I want to decide how much of my identity I allow the digital space to subsume by being selective about what I choose to give to it, if anything - but perhaps it's too late.

Before I launched Facebook, if there were photos published of me in which I appear 'f*cking wasted', I'm yet to see them. Since launching my Facebook profile, however, I have experienced harassment, unwanted sexual advances, having my images and IP stolen and even an incident of targeted and malicious trolling earlier this year, which saw me ask the same question I did all those years ago - is it better to know how I'm being presented online than to not know at all? 

I realise now that whatever I have published about myself online, and whatever others have published about me with or without my consent, is a free for all. If there is the intent, I know that any story can be crafted, any perception can be shaped and access to the online version of me is granted by design. When I signed up to Facebook and launched a digital identity - I didn't know I was signing up for that. 

My relationship with social media started with self monitoring, peaked with self promotion and currently, in part due to fear once again, I find myself craving a quiet digital retirement.

In 2009, at the age of nineteen, I was worried about one or two digital cameras lurking at the parties I attended and what images of me might be later published on Facebook. It feels difficult and a little terrifying, then, to imagine the experiences of young people these days with camera-capable cell phones, social media and other platforms being an ambient part of their lives.

What will happen when our true digital natives get older and look across the vast landscape of their digital footprints? After decades of investment, will they feel the same sense of fragmentation, exhaustion and exposure that I do? If, like me, they don’t always like or want their digital identity - the one that has been crafted, shaped and catalogued through algorithms, peer pressure, advertising, products and headlines – without having lived a life before digital, will they even consider that shedding their digital layers and starting afresh as an option?

This inevitably leads me to two further questions that I regularly grapple with: am I a true natural-born Luddite, projecting outdated and unfounded fears onto the next generation? And, should we want, is shedding our digital layer and starting afresh an option for any of us anymore..?