Cutting ties is no longer as easy as it used to be—but truthfully, we don’t really want it to be. As part of the social media generation who thrives off of the buzz online, we all crave knowing the latest news, gossip and trends before the next person. We have endless amounts of information filtering through our daily feeds and we can’t help but look. Well, stalk, more like.

Social Media Generation Lives in Cyber Reality

But why?

We are the generation who lives life through social media. We count Facebook friends as real-life friends, and gorge ourselves on information about the lives of people we haven’t talked to in years, knowing that they scroll through our homepage just as much. Even though these people aren’t our best friends, it’s likely that we know more about their lives through their posts, photos and comments than we are willing to admit. We just don’t want to miss out on anything…even at the cost of our own privacy.

Doesn’t something seem wrong about that?

The initial objective of Facebook was to grow the social network of college students on Harvard’s campus. Since Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004, the enormously popular website has gained over 1.2 billion members ranging in age and nationality. It’s rare to meet someone in the social media generation who doesn’t have a Facebook profile…we all conform to the ‘norm’ of Facebook. We post photos with our friends, comment on people’s wall, join groups and receive invitations to events all via one social network. Pretty incredible, right?

The online trail we have created of our personal lives is frightening. And the scary part—it’ll never go away. In generations past if a photo appeared in print at a party there was a good chance it’d disappear without a trace. That is certainly not the case today. Anything we do online is forever embedded into the cyber-world with a great possibility of resurfacing at some point. Nothing spreads news faster through the web than word-of-mouth. The issue: sharing information with people whom we hardly even know. While we might attribute more ‘friends’ to popularity, we really should consider who we have given a key to see the open-book of our lives that we willingly posted online.