The lost privilege of an ephemeral childhood

The privilege of an offline (or mostly offline) childhood is well acknowledged, including on this website. Less so is what we lost when the current social media companies cemented their place in history and the first platform you started using at 12 survived long enough for you to still be on it when starting your career in your 20s.

My first social media site was Bebo. My first social media ‘app’ was MSN. My Bebo page, opened before I finished primary school, was full of glitter animated Bratz dolls and complaints about homework. MSN was where I was unceremoniously dumped at 14. Bebo went bankrupt in 2013, the same year MSN was discontinued (and, graciously given the dumping, MSN was never intended to be a permanent cache of cringey status updates and discoverable chat logs). By the end of my second year at uni all evidence of my first posts was permanently lost. I didn’t recognise the privilege of this at the time, I was too busy trawling the internet to eliminate all record of my more recent time on the microblogging site, Tumblr. That’s a story for another day.

By contrast, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok all look far too big to fail. They are also (for the most part) public in ways the nascent sites were not. Facebook’s real name policy and the audiovisual formats used by Instagram and TikTok ensure that a teenager’s posts are tied to their real identity in ways that used to be optional (RIP golden era Tumblr). It is easy to forget now but prior to Facebook most public posting was done pseudonymously. To find someone online you needed to be told where to find them; the inscrutability of teenage screen names its own form of opsec.