I’m Nic Cameron, online.

I’m changing the way I interact with the internet.

What are you on about?

In short, I am uncomfortable with the way the bulk of my online existence is being used to make money for others.

I’m taking small steps to make sure my life, thoughts, and images will no longer be used as glue designed to hold your interest to a stream of carefully selected adverts made to exploit your need to feel connected to other people.

Alright, that sounds a bit weird, what are you going to do about it?

Here’s where I’m starting:

• Social media that puts advertising in the content shared by people I know or care about is out of my personal life. I’m deleting it from my phone and I’ll access it from a ‘work’ device when I need to engage with it professionally.
• I’ll share only what I am proud of, and what I think is valuable to people. That means useful things that I’ve learned, interesting places I have been and why I felt a connection to them, or ideas I want to talk about when we next meet up.
• If I’m sharing content about my family or the people I love, it will be with a more concrete purpose than gathering likes or little heart emojis.

Isn’t social media, like, your job?

Not really.

I currently work in communications for a large academic institution. My job is getting relevant content in front of the right audience. Sometimes that messaging is best placed on social media, but doing it professionally keeps my eyes open to vast amount of thought and effort given to making users feel that businesses, organisations, and influencers are their friends. That’s almost never true.

If you were to experience a social media stream in the real world it would be like your friend stopping suddenly between stories, delivering an advert in someone else’s voice, and returning immediately to their train of thought. That’s some creepy Black Mirror stuff. I don’t want my personal content to to be part of that.