How much pressure is there to be on our phones in 2021 and what does this say about our privacy?

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I’ve currently switched my phone off, my location off, deleted my private snap chat stories. I don’t want to share what I’m doing from day to day online anymore. I need more privacy.
 
We spend so much time online talking to people and sharing our lives, but when does it become too much? Years ago, the online world didn’t exist, but now it seems as though there’s so much pressure to be online, to tell people what we’re doing, to reply to messages and make our online presence known. It’s nice to share our lives, but how much of this is for our own benefit?
 
In some ways, lots of it is for our own benefit. We might share a post that makes us laugh, or a fun memory and we want to share that feeling with others. Social media can be good to show the best version of ourselves and connect with people easily. Spending lots of time on these apps has been normalised, and we can do so much from our phones.
 
But on the flip side, so many people post about their lives on social media, so we might feel as though we have too as well. When you hear that someone isn’t on Instagram or Snapchat, it’s almost as if they’re out of the loop. It’s like there’s a looming pressure to be there and tell everyone what you’re up to.
 
Anthony Burgess said in his book, Homage To Qwert Yuiop: Essays “To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.” Everyone needs a level of privacy, it’s part of being human. Sometimes, we might even share more than we would want to or need to because we feel as though we have to. Is the underlying pressure to be on our phones breaking our needed privacy?
 
Online statuses could be a factor affecting people’s privacy. Snap chat maps, if turned on, show’s your exact location when you are using the app. If you zoom in far enough, you can see exact houses and places from a bird’s eye view. Other apps such as discord and some games have online statuses, which can be turned off, but when on, pressure can start to creep in from people wondering why you haven’t replied to their messages yet or wondering what you’re doing.
 
However, online statuses can be useful in knowing if your friends are free to talk, that’s the point of having them. Snap chat maps can also be useful to see if your friends are safe. If people can see that you’re online, you can just choose to ignore messages if you really want to without necessarily feeling pressure. Those people who aren’t online as often, may not feel that pressure that some of us feel to be attached to our phones.
 
I wrote this article because recently, it’s started to make me feel uncomfortable that people can see what I’m doing all the time and I realised that maybe I was posting too much. You might be able to relate to what I’ve written in this article, you might not. Needing a level of privacy has started to creep up on me and I’m working on it, trying to find a middle ground.
 
Finding the balance between posting and our privacy can be a tricky one. How can we find that balance? I’ll leave that for you to decide.