This post was originally titled, “What is blogging in 2018?”, but my train of thought turned it into a different topic.
To draw from that original title, blogging in 2018 is not really that different from what I wrote in a previous post on blogging in 2017. Blogging, and by extension our online lives, are still filtered.
However, in the last year there have been some major shifts in the world of privacy. In March 2018, the Facebook / Cambridge Analytica scandal was widely reported in the media. And in May 2018, GDPR came into effect.
While these might not directly relate to blogging, I think it’s made people more conscious and aware of their right to online privacy. And it may discourage people from sharing information online. But I don’t think it’s done much to change the dominance of social media, apps, smartphones etc in so many of our lives.
When so much of social media has an extremely positive slant, it’s no wonder this is having negative effects elsewhere.
Apparently, we’re dying younger – due to “shit-life syndrome”.
Yet turn on the TV or visit a middle-class shopping mall and a very different and unattainable world presents itself
Will Hutton, The Guardian
I view social media as a contributor to this problem, too.
This post is a bit disjointed, but there’s a video that might help to bring these thoughts together a bit better: “Why we need to talk about depression“. Give it a watch.
