Monday, March 30, 2009

Sometimes I feel like somebody's watching me...

I have been actively using facebook since my sophomore year of college, and with the massive amount of content (pictures, wall posts, profile information) that my friends and I have posted since then, privacy considerations are a very real concern for me. It is interesting that social networking sites, which were originally meant for connecting with friends and acquaintances, have become a public space. I remember that when I was in college, a group of students who were members of the cross country team were kicked off the team as a result of photos of them drinking that were posted on facebook. Situations like this make me think about how I am represented on social networking sites, and who might be watching. Especially with the idea of the "invisible audience" that Dana Boyd wrote about (or what my friends and I call facebook-stalking) it's easy to forget that an SNS is not necessarily private.
I know that there are photos of me from college on facebook that I would probably not want an employer to see. This makes me wonder about the privacy settings for facebook and other social networking sites. Ideally I could limit my profile to be viewed only by my friends and trust that would be security enough. However, you have to consider who your friends are friends with, and who else might be able to see content that concerns me. Also, you have to consider that a "facebook friend" may not be an actual friend, but more of an acquaintance or coworker who I might not want to have access to my profile. When I was in college, facebook was only for college students, and originally only available to certain colleges. And the default privacy settings allowed your profile to be viewed by your friends and members of you college network, which seemed pretty safe. However, I remember that a girl that I had class with was interning with a major corporation in Denver, and part of her job was to use her facebook account to show the company the profiles of college kids who were applying for jobs. You never know who's going to see something that you put up. It became routine for seniors at my school to take down all the content off their profiles as they were applying for jobs, just in case.
I have recently been thinking that when I finish grad school and am really working in a career, I will delete my facebook account. Of course, all of the content that I have ever created will still exist, and I can't control what my friends put online. So perhaps a better tactic would be to not allow myself to be photographed doing anything stupid. Also, the prospect of quitting facebook means that I would instantly lose contact with a couple hundred people. I have been accruing "friends" since I was 19, I have my high school friends, college friends, study abroad friends, work friends, and now grad school friends. I can immediately get in touch with any one of them, where as without facebook, I would have probably lost their contact information years ago. There was an interesting article on the class wiki about SNS being the new email, an idea that I somewhat agree with. A few years ago I joined myspace at the behest of my coworkers at my summer job. I use it solely for keeping in touch with those people, using the messaging feature like email, and I don't have to keep track of everyone's email address.
During the last class, with my small group I looked at Twitter, something I had never really seen in action, but seem to be hearing about everywhere these days. I had vaguely heard that it consisted of sort of mini blogs of short answers to the question "what are you doing?", and to me this sounded miserable. Like the absolute worst part of facebook, inane status updates, and nothing else. After poking around the website, I could see the draw a little more, and I could see how it could be used by a library, sort of like a listserve as a way of directing people to points of interest on the website. I actually joined because I was interested in following some comedians and bloggers that I like. I even have 3 followers, but they are all people that I don't know, and I've never written a "tweet", so that's kind of weird.

No comments:

Post a Comment