WITH every year that passes, there are fewer and fewer people who remember a time before social media. In those bygone days, gossip was largely transmitted via people. Busybodies would dish the dirt on one family for the benefit of another, and spools of speculation and wonder would be unrolled into tangled threads of truths and lies. I mention this only because the human penchant for judging the lives of others and comparing them, consciously or subconsciously, with one’s own has existed for just as long as humans have themselves.

It is precisely this human inclination for knowing about other people’s lives that has made social media the wildfire it has become. In the span of a decade or so, our darker traits, such as bragging and making an open exhibition of our lives, have been turned by us into an industry. Suddenly, everyone — from a housewife in Lahore to a teenager in Toronto — has become a curator of his or her own life and is addicted to sharing all the details.

In this sort of sharing, they reveal not only what they wish to show but also other information. Apps like Facebook and Instagram track not just what is visible to others, but also what is being watched, what is being commented on, what is shown only to a small circle, and what is being shown to everyone.

In this way, the human inclination to peer into the lives of others has been transformed into a business model, as all that data about what people do online can be mined to reveal far more about........

© Dawn