‘The internet never forgets’ is a popular saying usually used to warn people against posting content they wouldn’t be proud of at some point in their lives.
We may have taken this saying lightly but very soon it will come back to haunt us. You see our parents lived in a good time when if they wrote a letter to their partners it was simply done on one piece of paper and rarely was it photocopied to multitudes to share it.
Similarly, it was usually very easy for them to distance themselves from any scandals by simply denying the authorship. Well, thanks to technology we no longer have such privileges that our parents may have enjoyed.
Most of us may have found ourselves in a situation where something we said or wrote has been spread via social media and in most cases the outcome is never what we anticipated.
The more abrasive ones amongst us however may not care what they say. I may not have lived during our parents’ youthful years but it is very unlikely that they announced to an audience of 5,000 plus whenever they were horny.
Our mothers, though some of them may have been single, did not declare to all sundry whenever they were looking out for a man to lay them. Even without social media, I do not think they took pictures of themselves and their lovers to show to their friends when they visited.
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They simply kept their business to themselves and if they had anything to say, they shared it with their close friends.
The contemporary Kenyan adult appears not to know what to say and what not to say, never mind that some of them are professionals that we hold with high esteem. They do not care that social media comes with a mixed audience that requires one to be very careful about what content to share.
We have not stopped to think how embarrassed we would have been if our parents announced on whatever platforms were available then their sexual escapades.
While we may think that we are entertaining our audiences and their likes attract more people to our pages, we forget the effects this may have on our children.
Adolescence is such a shaky stage and you do not want your parents parading their sexual escapades on social media. Our careless posts may expose our children to unnecessary bullying from their peers.
No matter which way we look at it our African society still strives to uphold morality and any deviation is still met with resistance.
We may be strong enough to combat our detractors but our children are yet to develop such thick skins. The internet never forgets, we may delete our pages and recall messages that we sent previously but just a screenshot is enough to do the damage.
Reminders of how horny we were in our 40s are the last thing we want to see in our old age.