In today's society the idea of ownership is so blurred because of our desire to share everything with everyone. We use social media to tell everyone about our daily lives and hope that the funny things we say and do get retweeted so that the entire world can see them. Being twitter and instagram famous are things many people strive for, and if a million people follow you on snapchat then it almost seems like a million people care. When it comes to information that is available on sites like Wikipedia it blurs the lines of ownership even more. Almost anything you Google these days will lead you to a Wikipedia page, or one of Wikipedia other sites such as wiki answers. When you Google sites that Wikipedia owns it take you to a link for a Wikipedia page that shows all of them. People actively go onto sites like these to correct the information that is provided or change it completely. As people we share everything on the Internet and once it gets out there it no longer belongs to us. This is also beginning to apply to print media as well. If someone wants a book they don't actually have to buy it now they just have to bootleg it, so the last form of media that is actually still able to be owned by someone is losing that title too.
If you ask my roommate she will tell you that she has a much stricter view of ownership. If she tweeted it then it belongs to her and people shouldn't be allowed to just take that from her. I feel like many people would also feel this way about their own things, but once it gets out in the world it cant really be yours anymore, so this view is very outdated and cant actually be held very well anymore. The only thing I can think of in my every day life that still has its own owner that can be found is my tattoos. Tattoos have a shared ownership, while it is on my body Ill never be able to truly say they're mine. The design and work put into them belongs to the artist, Tosha Carnes. When anyone ever asks me about them they ask who did them, and I tell them Tosha Carnes, so in a way they are Tosha's. Tattoos are really the only thing that ownership can truly be had on, and even then that line is blurred because while the artist did them, they are on someone elses body.
When people share their posts on social media I still think that it belongs to them, but I think the more important question is why do they share it if they know it has the opportunity to be stolen or claimed by someone else. Social media is full of theft, hypocrisy and bad people yet we still offer up everything we post online to these people. I think that the benefit of the people we care about sharing things with outweighs the negative outcomes of having ideas stolen. Why do we care so much about what we post and who sees it? What determines some of us to put our accounts on private and others to leave them public? We have kind of developed altered senses of feelings through our social media, because in real-life we would never want to be robbed or have something stolen from us, but when something is stolen from us online it becomes less of an issue.
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