How to Stay Away From a Friend’s Social Media Feeds
What if you are at a party and one of your friends starts taking pictures? Do you agree that whatever you do at the event might end up on Facebook or Instagram? Are you reluctant to squeeze into the back of a group selfie?
Or you ask your friend if he might not turn you on – your face, your kids’ faces, the joke you made that they can’t wait to tweet – on whatever social media post they are currently time to cook?
We live in an environment where many people are simultaneously pressured and eager to share every aspect of their lives on the Internet, whether it be communicating with distant loved ones, building their own career / brand, or just a continuous story about how they get to know the world.
But this continuous story often includes other people’s stories – and what do you do if you don’t want your story to be part of someone else’s social media feed?
One option is to hide when the phones come out. Toilet time to skip the group selfie; spoil the side dish on your cocktail or appetizer so it can no longer be posted on Instagram. Wear a hat and sunglasses to avoid facial recognition algorithms (although this is not always enough to fool the program ).
You can also update Facebook’s settings so that its facial recognition algorithms don’t automatically track you, and set any Facebook tagged images to “view”, which means you can decide whether or not they appear in your timeline.
Of course, you can’t decide if these photos will appear on other people’s timeline or if this one weird image of you will be copied into the meme.
This means that if you really want to stay away from other people’s stories on social media, you probably have to talk to them about it.
Or at least write to them.
In The New York Times, Hayley Phelan interviews influencers and experts on how to navigate these conversations. Priya Parker, author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters (for the record, one of my favorite 2018 books), suggests taking the initiative by inviting friends to meetings without social media:
Ms Parker recommends informing guests sooner rather than later that this will be a non-social media event. “The invitation is the first salvo of a social contract,” she said. “That’s what it is this time. These are the conditions. Are you inside? “It’s much easier than guarding the room.”
If you are not one of the organizers and cannot establish the terms of the social contract of the event, you can still negotiate this contract either one-on-one or with the whole group. Whispered, “Please, no photos with me today.” A short message to the group before the event, asking them to refrain from posting pictures of your children online. At the moment, at the table: “Don’t share it, thanks!”
In other words, no content without consent.
And yes, like any other awkward social interaction, the first few times you will feel strange, but these days I hear people say these things more and more often, and if we have enough conversations about giving up on social media, we could flip expectations and turn them into a subscription.
That is, instead of going to a party believing that everything you do might end up online, you go with the understanding that everything you do won’t stay online if you don’t give it up.