What follows is more a philosophical meandering on our readings on Social Media this week. As such, the pieces we read are not cited specifically, but rather inspired this loose discourse:

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As a *geriatric* millennial, I gleefully transitioned from chat rooms, to Geocities pages, to AOL/ICQ chat rooms, and inevitably to MySpace. MySpace was your personal space to share anything and everything you would like about yourself. And we tended to overshare. This was the age of posting random thoughts, pictures of every meal, but also a way to legitimately keep up with friends and family. 

In retrospect the rapid-fire transitions from social media platform to platform have been relatively seamless until one takes the time to put the brakes on and look back. Facebook was like a MySpace plus, but quickly deteriorated towards pushing promoted materials (and of course misinformation). Instagram and Twitter were platforms we hopped on next, striving to recapture that “authenticity” increasingly lost. Instagram brought us back to images of our friends and families, and Twitter allowed for an open and international forum to share thoughts. Until- again, an inevitable slouch towards promoted content and a propensity for circulating misinformation. 

This breakneck change in how we consume, and now create media content also passed us by. Where I was once enthusiastic to share my thoughts and pictures from the latest social gathering, I have largely stopped. Like so many of us, I have friends who have been, or currently are micro-influencers whose social media presence began to take on a language of branding, marketing, and eventually, a least a little advertising. Besides my personal disinterest in being a known entity, the strain of continuing to come up with content to support your profile, and boost interaction and reach- tires me out just thinking of it. Not to mention the fear of generating the unintended ire not only of the public at large, but possibly by current and future employers. 

And to the question, of who owns this content? While the creator does have the power to ultimately remove their content and/or profile from these platforms, posts may have been captured by other means. Do we know if the platforms that hosted them truly delete their information? And where one wants to aggregate data from posts whether for commercial or academic purposes- where is the line drawn on who owns what? When is consent for use called for? Is embedding an individual post enough credit? What of scraping large amounts of data? And the logistics of getting informed consent, especially when using massive troves of data? Of course, the platforms themselves hold the bulk of these keys. 

We’ve known this, and we’ve known that each new platform that has the potential to be the next place to find our collective authenticity will inevitably by spoiled for the purpose of increasing revenue- but yet, we often stay on the ride perhaps a little too long- until eventually the ride naturally comes to an end, or some sort of brakes are suddenly pressed, allowing us the moment to finally reflect on the racetrack we find ourselves on, and will likely stay on.