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Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Privacy in a world of Facebook
These videos are the inspiration behind my research paper on how social networking has affected our concept of privacy. My idea is that for many of today's teenagers, the idea of keeping their private lives private is actually quite foreign. Growing up I remember "chat rooms" and learning about online safety - never give out your real name, etc. Today that concept is laughable. 500,000,000 people have their full name on Facebook. And people aren't shy about posting status updates:
"So yesterday laila refusedd to take a nap today we are going on hr 3..."
"I cried today out of joy. (: I am so relieved."
"The defense attorney dismissed me as a juror this morning. Phew."
"left my bag at work. F***. ugh i wish i had a car!"
"drove to orca for no good reason. silly c7's and thier beach stuff....ugh"
"Bored out of my mind"
"At the hospital. Mom is going in for stomach surgery right now. Not for anything bad, she just needs to have some sort of feeding tube. Prayers!"
"So guess who got to wear their dinosaur footie pajamas to class?? Oh yes, yes indeed."
"im on facebook... mary is on the subway website ordering a sandwhich. gotta love college english."
"leaving tomorrow night for new york!! cant wait so excited!!"
"'Steam does NOT come out of oranges!' Ah, the wonderfu things that are said in science."
"Being this sick with out my parents makes it ten times worse :("
"Giving blood today... TERRIFIED."
"okay vitamin on a empty stomach...not a good idea."
"trying to do something thats IMPOSSIBLE."
"My sleeping pattern is so off. Stupid hostile cyst. Begone!"
"is thinking about returning to long hair. Hmm..."
Social Networks like Facebook and Twitter make it possible to let hundreds of people know where you are and with whom, share every thought that passes through your mind, share photos of every event of your life, and let everyone know what you're doing, what you're listening to, and what you're watching at any given moment. With the addition of Facebook mobile, you don't even need to be at a computer to share information about yourself with all 651 of your Facebook friends {and, if you're not careful with your privacy settings, with all of their friends as well.}
I'm not passing judgement on whether this is good or bad, I'm merely observing that the old-school notion of "privacy" seems to be passing away.
What are the effects of social networking on the concept of privacy in the mind of the rising generation, and what are the potential ramifications of this change? This is the question I will be attempting to answer :)
Hey Cecelia, this in a intriguing topic and definitely fills the karios part of the assignment. Just to understand, your main point of this paper is to say that true privacy is rare to find now days thanks to social networking, yeah? I think it would be interesting if you could find a modern study that finds out what privacy means to a person and how important it is to them.
ReplyDeleteYeah! Kind of going along with what Mark Zuckerberg said about the age of privacy being over - "People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people."
ReplyDeleteI just think that with the popularity of social networking today, privacy has become "uncool" to the younger generation. They don't care as much about privacy as their parents do.
And you're right, true privacy is almost impossible to find today.
I am looking for just such a survey! Haha. Let me know if you find something? :)
I've got a little different perspective for you on this one. Those of us in my generation (X) are hit and miss with privacy settings on Facebook. Many of us know enough to keep things private to our friends only. However, those in my parents' generation often think their profiles are private but did NOTHING to make sure that they were. In general they are totally out of the loop. I had to set up my dad's page and set his privacy settings...that said I think FB has changed so many times over the last year or two that I need to go back in for him and update the settings.
ReplyDeleteFrom what I've seen on our business FB page, those in generation Y have EVERYTHING blocked as private. I don't think I've seen one teenager with open access to their profile. And the new generation? Their privacy is usually open if their parents aren't computer/internet savvy and closed if they've got an illegal profile (like my kids) and their parents are in the know.
As a business owner, we have devoted a portion of our last company meeting to social networking privacy settings. We've asked employees to make their profiles and photos private. If they were at a party drinking with their buddies, we don't want our students to be able to see those photos. They are not to become friends with students or have a relationship with them on a personal level (unless they are family friends and were friends before the class started).
Anyway, the day we did this I went through and checked all of our office staff profiles. Even those who thought their profiles were private were surprised at what I could find.
The interesting thing is that even though my FB profile is on lock down, my blog is public. Though I do have my privacy set so that if you click on my photo, it will only show my business blog and not my personal one...that was a business decision as it used to show all the blogs I write on. And if you really want to know more about me, you can find it. But you have to go an extra step.
One more thing...I hate word verification for comments. Please take it off! Maybe you didn't even know it was there since it's not there for you. If you get a comment that is mean/nasty/spam, you can delete it under the comment tab in Blogger in Draft.
ReplyDeleteOh I didn't even know I could change that! Thanks, it annoys me too on other people's blogs. :)
ReplyDeleteThat is true! It's interesting what people have public on in the internet and what is kept private. I'm obsessive about privacy settings on my facebook, strangers don't see anything, and I even keep people I don't know that well from seeing everything. That said, I have a public blog that people from Malaysia can see.
ReplyDeleteI also think there's an interesting difference between what people will tell complete strangers, and what they'll tell the people they actually know.
On Facebook, even if they have privacy settings to keep people who aren't their friends from viewing everything, some people are still surprisingly candid and open about what used to be their private lives. Now it's on the internet for all their hundreds of "friends" to see. Just interesting to me how some people seem to not want a private life. Or they "vaugebook" - writing a status directed at a specific unnamed person, or being all cryptic in what they say. It just seems like some teenagers today aren't interested in keeping their private life private anymore, at least not from their 500 closest friends.