The FIRE-Wall of China

Soon I will be spending a month travelling through China, and a friend reminded me that there is a Facebook ban within Mainland China which is pretty much everywhere in China and where I will be going. How could I have forgotten? My first reaction was shock and then sheer laughter at the fact that I was so overwhelmed with disbelief at this sudden realisation.

“How will I keep in touch with people?” was my first question which is still lingering long after my friend had answered this for me – email. *Involuntary whole body shudder.* I had come to depend so much on the convenience of Facebook that I no longer knew what the pre-Facebook day and age was like. Email (long pause) – Really?

My research into why China’s government had banned such a popular social networking site took me back in time to July 5th 2009 of the fatal riots in the western region of the Xinjiang province in China. Facebook had been unceremoniously used to stir up ethnic wars and organised violence while YouTube provided video footage of the incident. Kathryn Foley writes in an article:

“Because of the pandemonium and outrageous behaviour of the citizens, China's central government has increased its great firewall and put a block on all access to foreign web services. They had already prohibited the use of YouTube and every Google service such as Gmail, Google Apps and Google Talk (all modes of communication) weeks ago.”

What this leaves me to question is whether or not this type of strict censorship is effective in eliminating ethnic tensions and organised riots. I understand China has had a very long and complicated history of political tension which continues to this day. But in stacking up their list of web server lockdowns, I can’t help but wonder, is this detrimental to their country’s already unstable image?

The question of fairness also comes into play. Does the Chinese government have the right to block major websites and censor online traffic? Well, it may not be just but they certainly have the power to carry out what they wish. This move has potentially alienated the rest of the world as it does not make China seem like a very pleasant place to live or visit.

Of course, it is arguable that it was the right thing to do by blocking Facebook as the potential and result of social hysteria caused the death of over 140 people. Though, Facebook and its millions of previous users of Mainland China are also victims in this situation. Despite Facebook’s strong online community of over 500 million users, China is a massive population to be dropped after the lockdown.

Also, what about the innocent users who just used the web server to keep in touch with their friends and people overseas? Even though people have quickly jumped on board to other social networking sites, they had still lost their freedom to participate in a social medium which has transcended ethnic boundaries and is considered an integral part of the 21st century.

And at the end of the day and at the end of my blog, will banning these web servers really solve China’s problems? Is the medium really the message? As coined by Marshall McLuhan in his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, which states that the medium embeds itself in the message and influences how the message is to be perceived. I don't believe Facebook is at fault here; its services were vandalised by people who simply did not know better.

Only time can tell what China plans to do next, though I’m not hopeful they will re-establish Facebook any time soon or before my travels.

Facebook (+1) vs. Google

Facebook’s blog today revealed the latest attack in the Facebook vs. Google battle. Facebook have joined forces with Microsoft’s search engine Bing to make searching “more social” and take a significant amount of users away from the power-house search engine Google.

Facebook’s blog makes a point of how significant our friends’ preferences and opinions are to our own choices, and the new partnership with Bing aims to give you exactly that with regard to whatever you’re searching for. For example, if I were to search ‘the Expendables’ on Bing, I could see how many of my facebook friends liked the film, which is supposed to help me make the decision on whether or not I will watch the film or influence my own opinion on the film.

The concept basically evolves from Facebook’s agenda to recommend you things, whether it is a film, cafe, restaurant or another person, whatever your friends like or whoever your friends are connected to will show up at the top of your search list.

As far as the Facebook vs. Google battle goes, the new partnership with Bing aims to encourage people to use Bing rather than Google as their primary search engine online. Bing has a significantly fewer users than Google but considering the population of Facebook, the new social search feature could see Bing become a significant threat to Google.

Of course, Google won't be taking this lying down. After the failure of Google Wave earlier this year, Google have been working on another social networking site to compete with Facebook titled Google Me.

While Facebook and Google continue competing for the internet, I do wonder what effect something like social searching will have on social interactions in real life. Will we have less to actually talk about when Facebook is doing it all for us, and will the quality of a friends opinion become irrelevant in favour of the quantity of friends liking something?

On Facebook, no-one can hear you scream...

...primarily because no-one is listening. The wonderful thing about "democratic" forums such as blogs, Facebook, YouTube, cubicle walls in public school toilets, is that everyone can have a say - if they have a permanent marker handy in the case of the toilet wall.

As I like to say, the wonderful thing about democracy is that it gives everyone an equal opportunity to disagree with each other. Which is precisely why the rail-link from Downtown to Mt. Eden etc, will not get done until Steve Jobs has had his brain removed and preserved in a robot made from recycled iPod nanos.

I'm going to be slightly cynical here. YouTube comments rarely dip into anything that could be called... thoughtful. Often the height of intellectual endeavour tends to be "LOLZ, TEH KAT Fe!! down Lolz!!!!!!! ^^ XD." Only a truly twisted mind would use that many exclamation marks. Facebook "likes" and groups are, as rightly pointed out, not a statistical reference. They are products of the moment, something that rallies or amuses people for a split second. Personally I have over 400 likes and I could probably name about 12 or so.

Everyone has a say. So chances are no-one is actually listening. You have to be of unusual skill or just post at the right time, self-marketing is extremely important. Being hot is an easy form of self-marketing, because every guy on Facebook wants to be friends with that girl with a chest big enough to crush his head.

We are supposed to be "prosumers" or perhaps even... The Engineers of Generation LOL. I don't believe in this model, or the producer-distributor-consumer one. Everyone is an audience member at some point, even the producers. And not nearly everything that gets produced gets consumer. Look at this blog. We all contribute and that's fantastic. But no-one comments. We all stand and give grand speeches while those who aren't orating block their ears.

I'm not saying that it should be a utopia where everyone posts carefully thought-out comments with well-considered arguments and opinions. Hell no! Actually I don't know what I'm saying, but I do know that we have a lot of crap to wade through before we find that post/comment/rant that is a little diamond in a bucket of pointy LOL-shaped rocks.

Just make sure it is a diamond, because often the sparkle sells better than the stone.

P.R. (Post-Rant): This blog would be a lot more interesting if people actually commented on stuff. Just saying.

Work, Leisure, and Profit

Source

Do Facebook owners owe users monetary rewards for using the network, popularizing the network, and facilitating profits into their pockets? Is "profit" one-sided? Does using Facebook count as Marxist' notion of 'leisure'? This post will answer the questions by: re-examining Marxist's idea of 'profit' on popular social networking sites like Facebook, and re-defining 'leisure' within the context of capitalism and Facebook use.


Facebook and its Profits
It has been said that advertisers take advantage of the time and free labour users invest in interacting on Facebook to make money. From a Marxist perspective, this is unfair on the user as he or she gains nothing in return. I find this perspective when applied to digital capitalism highly problematic. I say so because the social networking site is not one-sided in its profits. Marx considers profit to solely mean 'money' or anything monetary. I think that for SNS, profit means a 'gain' and the gains of SNS works both ways - Corporates AND users. Some people gain unconscious and conscious profits from using Facebook, so it really depends on personal motivation. Besides the site as a network to find friends and maintain connections, other two non-monetary profits I want to point out that has been discussed in lectures are: Facebook as informing identity, and Facebook as facilitating news-sharing.


I don't want to go in-depth into the theoretical facet of identity, so I will just summarize in a few sentences. Facebook provides its young adolescent users with opportunities to experiment with identities and maybe settle on one. Though identity is a process of "becomings", that is, it's never stable, the site enables these young teens to portray online who they are or who they'd like to be in real-life. This informs the person they eventually construct themselves to be in real-life. The site for them is also a platform for social interaction and esteem boost. My point being, though they popularize the site which monetarily profits advertisers and Facebook developers, these users also gain something that influences their lives in the long run (whether they know it or not).


Concerning the profit of news sharing, journalism has now expanded beyond the television set and the newspapers. People are now active in the production and consumption of news, and this is facilitated on social networks where they can share news with other users. News is now a "social currency" disseminated through social spaces like Facebook. This gift economy is profitable to users as they shape who they are and examine their ideologies around the news they share, while corporates consequently earn monetary profits. To me, it's a win-win situation, only the gain/s or 'profit' differ.


Of course, if you're a stale Facebook user, you need not worry your money is being laundered as you only need to be active on the network before you can blame advertisers for money laundering. Even if we admit they’re making money out of our network use, we are not labouring for free; rather, we’re only paying for the beneficial services they’re providing. These services include: keeping in touch, facilitating social relations and identity negotiations; and sharing news. If Facebook owners decide to start subscription, that to me, is money-laundering. The subscription will be the surplus value where what we gain in return is less than what goes out of our pockets and the amount of labour we exert.


Facebook-use and Leisure
I’m however not completely on the side of Facebook or any other monetarily-profitable social networking site. This is because of the notion of ‘leisure’. I agree with the Frankfurt School theory that leisure is supposed to be a compensation of work but it benefits capitalists and not the individual. In the case of Facebook, I don’t see the site as a place of leisure. We are still using our bodies to produce surplus value. In a way, ‘leisure’ can involve consumption which according to Marx is only encouraging capitalism, as we consume to buy more. However, consumption should be outside of work. If using Facebook during ‘leisure times’ only produces more profit for the capitalists behind the network, then that is not leisure. Though we may gain the three gains I highlight above, we're not partaking in leisure. Leisure should be free of two-sided gain or profit, no matter what 'profit' entails. Using an example from a student in my tutorial, if cleaning the toilet which gives the person a feeling of fulfilment means this reward is productive, at least, there's no monetary value attached to it, thus it is an activity outside capitalistic gains.

Do we have the right to completely "own" our profiles, or is Facebook ultimately the property of its owners? 2) Do users have the agency to ignore or click adverts?

Privacy, Profile Ads, and Agency

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 Are money-making advertisers who import personalized ads into our "private" spaces online manipulative culprits? Do we have the right to completely "own" our profiles, or is Facebook ultimately the property of its owners? Do users have the agency to ignore or click adverts? This post tries to answer these questions by: asserting the rights Facebook's advertising has to "invade" our profiles, and examining the active means the average user uses to respond to advertising.

Personalized ads
So you open your homepage, click to browse profiles or play a game, and to the right hand side, you notice a line of different sorts of adverts. Of course, you get this all the time, so it's only natural to ignore it instantly, but you don't. Why? Because at least two of those ads appeal to some of your personal interests. For a moment, you start to wonder how in the world Facebook could direct ads that the personal information you'd put on your profile. You remember reading somewhere that Facebook measures the quality of our interactions and relationship to determine what we see in our news feed, so you settle for this scientific justification. But the thing is, you can't stand adverts anymore especially when they invade the space you thought was private. You can't stand it, but you can't get rid of it.

I certainly feel like this and I'm sure I'm not the only one. I don't want anyone to measure up anything about me, deliver it to advertisers (who make money out of my free service), and then dish me with ads I didn't ask for in the first place. The questions to consider are: do they need permission from me? Should they pay me money if I respond to that advert? My answer shockingly is...no. I say this because just as the information we disclose to the public sphere is no longer in our control and ownership, so is what we put online in a public space like Facebook. We may own our profiles, but we don't own the site in which our profile is situated. Though privacy settings may apply to its users, it does not apply to the corporates behind it. Is it unethical for employers, educational institutions or commercial entities to access and use information we make publically available online, or is it our own responsibility to limit and control personal information? On Facebook, no matter how private we choose to set our information, the control we have is minimal because of the context the information is situated. Same thing applies to e-mails and any other site where we get random adverts in our 'private' spaces. So, I don't think we should complain about this. BUT, what about when they're making money off this, what do we get in return? How do we respond to adverts though?


Agency
As Marxists would claim, consumers and producers of cultural products have little to no agency to think and reflect on what they're doing - that is, assisting the capitalist system. These bodies of thinkers reckon the cultural industries manipulate us into using our bodies for free labour, and we get paid less than the amount of work we do. They see us as passive consumers who think we need something, when really, we only fulfil temporary desires only to keep the manipulative system of production going. Cultural theorists claim otherwise. According to them, we are active in our production and consumption. I lean towards this cultural perspective in terms of advertisements and the amount of 'control' or agency we have on them. Marx would say because these ads are specifically personalized and imported into our online private spaces, the capitalist (advertiser) gains his money, and due to our false consciousness, we go ahead and succumb to the ad. This is a bit far-fetched. Certainly, we do not always respond to ads on television, so why would we respond to online ads? We are neither passive nor are we oblivious to the profit advertisers make from this process.

So in short, privacy is limited whether we like it or not. Corporates are ultimately in control of our online spaces and the private information we put there. With adverts, it’s a choice to click. I ignore it if I have no interest in it. Facebook is its owners' property so I believe they can do what they want to do with my information, as long as it does not harm me or any other user in any way. Thus, it is no longer a matter of privacy, it is a matter of harm.

1) Advertisers make money off our information, should we get anything in return? 2) Does using Facebook count as Leisure?

To friend or not to friend. That is the question

Friends, they are our partners in crime, the people whom we love, support and laugh with. Friends pick you up on a bad day and lend a hand when you need one. Friends are the people we confide in, they lend a shoulder to cry on or offer an ear to listen to your problems. Friends are people who share our likes and interests, offer companionship and are people who we enjoy being around. They are the people we have grown up with, people who we have met from sport teams, schools and youth groups. Traditionally we would interact and communicate with our friends by seeing each other face to face, talking on the phone, writing letters, Christmas and birthday cards.

However, something that really interests me is the idea of online friendships and whether the dynamic of friendship has changed since the invention of the internet. If you think about it, social network sites like facebook allow its users to combine all of their networks and converge them into one space. Take my own page for example; I have 394 friends who include work mates, family and friends from the various schools I attended as well as friends who I have met online. Social network sites make it easy and effortless for individuals to keep in touch. By the click of a mouse I can see how my cousin in Russia is doing by looking at her status updates, or by viewing her pictures. I can send emails, virtual gifts and cards over the internet much like I would in times when these technologies were not available. I can instant-message and Skype my friends, talking to them in real time and be kept in the loop of what goes on in their daily lives.

The internet even allows me the opportunity to meet and become acquainted with people online whom I would otherwise not have the chance to meet outside of the cyberspace world. Can these people then too be classed as friends? Social network sites in general seem to encourage this kind of behaviour amongst its users. I would consider some people whom I have met through various blogs, websites and social network sites to be my friends as I am sure many other people have too.

What do you think? Has the idea of friendship and those who we regard as friends really changed all that much with the invention of the internet? If you think about it, we still do many of the same things to keep in contact with friends that we have always done, except now it is done online. Emails have replaced hand written litters as skyping and text messaging has replaced phone calls. In essence, it is very much the same. On the other hand, many of us today also have friends and contacts from places all around the world whom we have never actually met face to face but talk to regular basis. In this instance the concept of a friendship has changed dramatically as it challenges traditional notions of friendship. Is it the same or different? Looks like friendship is changing with technology too, do you agree?

Facebook, Privacy and Control.

Danah Boyd's article "Facebooks Privacy Trainwreck" alerts readers to many things we may not of noticed before...
Before everything is stated lets breakdown what Privacy actually means... Privacy can mean a lot of things to many different people it can mean personal space, secutirty, having control over the information shared with others or as Boyd describes it privacy or the concept of "private" is simply a single bit that is either 0 or 1 meaning the data is either exposed or not....
now lets examine the role of privacy in social networks...when we are on Facebook we dont stop and think who will read our posts, view our pictures, post on our wall...Why?? well we have the right to make our page as private as we can right?? meaning only our friends can view our pictures or our posts however we dont stop to think about other people who may also have indirect access to our pages...for instance your friend accidently leaves her Facebook open in a private setting and your page happens to be open..everyone as a result can view the page (without permission) but can do so anyways..so no matter how "private" we make our information on social networks such as Facebook we are left with little control on how much privacy we actually have...
A discussion was bought up in Tutorial about an instance in which a person posted pictures up on Facebook of himself on a trip the same day he called in sick at work?? so if the manager happens to stumble across those pictures do they have a right to give that person a warning?..fire them?... in my personal opinion individuals have to be really careful about what they choose to post on public social websites...at the end of the day what we share was our choice..no one forces us to share things we would rather not share to the public therefore we all make rational decisions which sometimes have repercussions.
so in social networks such as Facebook what is the barrier we cross in order to decide whether we are willing to give-up some of our most private moments to other individuals?
one can simply reply with friends and family...however how many people can actually go on their Facebook and declare that every person on their friends list is worthy of knowing all the details they wish to share...to be honest this may be a mere handful of people.
So at the end of the day we as individuals have to take a step back and examine how much Privacy we actually control...yes it is true that you can always deactivate your Facebook, delete all your information and pictures but your account still lives on in the vast world of cyberspace waiting patiently to be reactivated with the push of a button.
Therefore whether we like it or not our information lives on long after we are gone.

Social Networking has gone to the dogs!?

Has social networking really gone to the dogs? Well, it actually has not, because what the title intends is completely different from the actual meaning of the phrase.

As all of us know, facebook has changed things around us in many ways. It has changed the way we interact with our friends, family and maybe strangers, it has changed the boundaries of what 'friendship' might actually mean to a lot of people, it has made people look differently at how gender is portrayed online and some might say it has changed communication all together.
However, what I want to bring up is that facebook has gone beyond all of this, and now tapped in to a new dimension - helping animals communicate! - and no, I am not making this up!

This brings me back to the title of this blog. I got this title from the title of an article in today's Sunday Herald. So what this article talks about is that facebook or a third party through facebook has developed applications for dogs, cats, birds, fish, horses and the like called DogBook, CatBook etc. What this app does is let the dog owners make profiles for their pets on facebook - and these profiles function in the same way as the ones for humans! - and helps them connect with other such users who also have pets for their pets. At first it comes across as pretty ridiculous - why would someone want to give their pet a profile?! But then as I went on to read the article, I realized that those users were actually quiet serious about this.

As this one user said, "Animals are in your life for enjoyment and Dogbook is an extension of that. It's a way to share information and connect with like minded people who are passionate about their pets." Yet this article didn't seem to make any sense to me. Why a social networking site would want to extend their to animals, is beyond my understanding. Because, those animals, who the application is meant for, cannot themselves make their profiles and use them or update them. It has to be doe by their owners. So isn't this just an extension the actual purpose of facebook then? Humans / people who 'connect' with like minded people through this SNS can also use it to 'connect' with other pet owners? What then is the purpose of creating an application which supposedly lets pets connect with other pets?

Another such pet owner who has made a Dogbook profile for her dog says that her dog "Deserves a Doogbook page," Why she feels so, well is only known to her. But for the rest of us, it might just be some food for thought. Do online communication technology developers actually feel / think they can extend its reach to animals now?

Freemium Facebook

What features of Facebook (existing or potential) would you be prepared to pay for?

   

I did some soul searching of my thrifty self and the conclusion I came to centred on privacy.  For the majority of members of the Internet generation who have come to equate ‘online content’ with ‘free’, any measures to implement a pay system for content that can easily be shared or transferred simply does not work.  You say I have to pay to view the full text of this news article?  No problem! Google can easily point me in the direction of another news website which has published this article for free.  Similarly, while it has been suggested that premium video or photo editing tools embedded within Facebook would be worthwhile ‘user pays’ features, I personally would be most likely to forgo the added convenience in favour of continuing to utilise free third party software.  However, should Facebook require me to purchase the right to alter the default privacy settings (something no other provider can offer me), then I would seriously reconsider my ‘Facebook-is-free’ mindset ... particularly in light of concerns surrounding the newly released Facebook Places (with a default privacy setting allowing your friends to check you in to any place at any time) which other bloggers have commented on.

Paying for privacy is no newfangled notion.  Certainly, people have (happily?) exchanged money for unlisted phone numbers, tall fences and curtains at home, even Swiss bank accounts!  Yet, there is conflicting evidence over whether people are prepared to pay for privacy within the online domain.  For example, while one study on online shopping found that participants were likely to purchase a product from a merchant that requested a greater degree of sensitive personal information than another in order to save as little as one Euro, a different study concluded that people were in fact willing to pay a higher price in order to protect their privacy (albeit, on average, only 60 cents more per $15 of value).  With contemporary preoccupations with privacy as a right, I suppose the question really becomes whether charging users for this right is a legitimate business model (and a sign of things to come), or an exercise in extortion.

danah boyd and the facebook news feed.

danah boyd’s reading highlighted some issues for me about Facebook. Firstly I find Facebook as a useful tool to allow social behaviour between connections with people that would have otherwise not have existed or would have cease to exist in the first place. Secondly it is a great way for me to plan events, get invitations to events, join causes and see updates on pages that I have interest in. Facebook is like a social hobby. In this way I forget about its privacy functions or ‘lack thereof’.
I find this interesting in relation to dannah boyd’s argument that news feeds popped the privacy bubble that people thought they had on a social networking forum like Facebook. All of your activity would appear in a communal news feed among your friends, which made it easier for people to ‘keep tabs’ on you and see your associations and revelations about yourself. She mentioned that this scared people at first and that without the ability to ‘rank’ Facebook friends in accordance with the depth of the relationship, people became anxious about utilising the complete social networking tool that is Facebook. She also mentions that because we have such an overload of data flow constantly appearing in our news feed, and the mass of data we comprehend about our Facebook friends, via news feeds, gives us a sense of false intimacy with these people.
I half heartedly agree with her. News feeds have always been common place in the time I’ve been using Facebook, so I guess the factor of a ‘lack of privacy’ doesn’t register. It is part of the norm. In all honesty, half of my Facebook interaction comes from engaging with my news feed, so in all essence I would be a dull and introverted Facebook user without it. I also find that in knowing Facebook is a public network, I subconsciously correct and screen my information and posts before sending them- nothing that is explicitly personal or socially incriminating- therefore news feeds are not really a privacy issue.
What I do agree with is that news feeds, and the abundance of information you can receive from them, does allow you to be more ‘personally engaged’ with your friends; which is oxymoronic as there is nothing personal about Facebook. I guess it is because these people and their activity are constantly appearing, you feel this sense of a ‘personal connection’. Almost as if the tabs are being kept for you by Facebook. I see how this is a worrying factor in regards to Facebook applications. So in relation to a false sense of personal relationship acquired by the news feed application, I find dannah boyd has an interesting and somewhat truthful point.
Source:
Boyd, d. (2008) ‘Facebook’s privacy trainwreck: exposure, invasion and social convergence’ in Convergence,Vol 14(1): 13-20. Course Reader.

Is technology "killing" us?

Recently, a young girl was tragically killed by a car when she attempted to cross a road – also whilst listening to an iPod. As a result of the phenomenon of Facebook, I heard this news first when my friend’s new status popped up on my Homepage:

“If a girl steps onto a pedestrian crossing and is hit by a car the car killed her, if the girl is listening to an ipod when she is hit the ipod killed her. With all due respect to the poor girl I think you are being a bit sensationalist NZ Herald.”

I also agree with my friend’s point of view, the reporter was being a little exaggerative. The iPod did not kill the girl. There are still many logistical questions needed to be answered about the case such as the speed of the car before and during impact, and whether or not the victim was actually on the pedestrian crossing etc.

This got me wondering about our dependence on new media and the control that it can have over us and our day to day life. To be frank and please no judgement - I like writing essays. There is nothing like the feeling of having completed a piece of writing that is coherent and eloquent in all aspects. But with the rise of social networking sites, mainly Facebook, I have become addicted and spent a lot of unnecessary time procrastinating by stalking other people’s pages and photos. Is Facebook just a new medium for putting off our assignments or have we always distracted ourselves with other meaningless fluff?

This situation can be referred to the “master-slave dialectic” as coined by G W F Hegel who said that “those who enslave others will become enslaved themselves.” Let’s hope he wasn’t thinking of a Facebook World Domination when he made this statement!

Privacy on SNS

As we live in the digital age, people pay more attention to the privacy on the internet and social network sites such as facebook in particular. From the reading ‘Facebook’s Privacy Trainwreck’, Danah Boyd mentioned that “News Feeds” on Facebook made aggregating information more accessible and visible to everyone and pointed out how this new feature expose information in public. But, as long as you control privacy how much and what you are going to share, I don’t think this new feature is a big problem as a privacy loss.

I have an account on Facebook and whenever I log in to facebook, News feed provides me information about what my friends have been up to and with whom they accepted as “friend” lately which helps me keep tabs on them. Usually I use facebook only to interact with friends I already know, and I don’t want to all the materials and information I share with them to be available for anyone to see. So I checked my privacy settings on facebook and made sure that all materials I have on SNS is only available to me and my friends.

I guess many people fear of what other people may think of their actions on facebook or on any other SNS. If people don’t want to lose their privacy and not get embarrassed, they may need to check their facebook for any inappropriate postings and also untag themselves from the drunken photos.

To sum up, I think it is our responsibility to limit and control personal information on the internet. SNS user should control their own privacy settings and more cautions should be taken when they posting some personal details on internet.

Are Facebook Friends Real Friends?

New media and the internet have redefined the boundaries and conditions of friendship and social relationships. Social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace have redefined the definition ‘friendship’ and for many, these sites have opened a portal towards meeting new people with similar interests, or perhaps mutual friends. The social networking sites have allowed for the expansion of the communication process across yet another easy to use medium, that is more attractive than an email or chat forum, or even a phone call, as it offers the all same features, with simplistic capabilities and the option of multitasking. And although for many of us Facebook users have not experienced the negative consequences for using such websites, they still exist and pose a threat to the future of social relations.

For many of us who grow and move through different areas of life, it could be school, university, different jobs, Facebook allows us to find and connect to people from all of these areas, even when they have passed through our lives and we no longer socially interact on a personal level any more. And as time goes by, a continuing appears to be that more and more people who were once part of your life, or have met you only a couple of times decide to be your friend on Facebook. So we have to ask ourselves, do we accept these people because are truly friends with them and plan to engage in further social relations in the future, or press that button which says confirm for voyeuristic purposes, to see and take a look at what other people may be up to?

In my own personal experience, on my departure from high school was met with several friend requests from people I went to school with, but had never engaged in any sort of conversation with in my life, which resulted in them being denied. Facebook and other sites should be for communication amongst the relevant people within our lives, and a social problem is that is has become about receiving high friend counts and viewing others’ personal information for the purpose of entertainment. Friendship is reduced and mocked in this sense, and with websites such as Facebook, we should be smart with our personal information, because at the end of the day, you don’t know who’s looking.

Privacy and FB

Is there a private life in our online communities?

if there is, how private would it be?

I was lingering on Facebook (oh yes AGAIN) and i was wondering should i change my privacy settings. but as i was looking through it, i found it quite tricky. It gave me the option of disclose certain informations about myself to either my friends, everyone, friends of friends and even the 'other' option that allows you to customize your privacy setting. If we look at it closely and think about it, all these options doesn't really help in maintaining your privacy. One of the most amazing?stupid?tricky? part of Facebook is the friend request option. I was looking at it the other day and found out that Facebook have automatically requested some strangers to be my friend without my authorization. If i didn't found out about this the other day, that stranger might have been my 'friends' and all my informations will be disclose to a total stranger.

To be honest, i do not believe that there is this sense of privacy on any online social networks. For me, the whole point of joining a social network is to disclose some of my informations, and sharing it with my friends and family. With this in mind, i would not be constantly thinking of whether my information will leak out to somewhere else or not, because if it ever happens, i am kind of expected it to be.

Whatever we choose to post on our profile in a social network site, it does not only limited to our friends and family. These information can be easily track down by some other people. One of the current trend that i am seeing on Facebook is the commercial aspect of it, and how it manipulate the informations network in Facebook. Some people actually created a profile and start selling their products. Well that sounds perfectly fine, but the thing is, they tagged people in their pictures so that other people around the people who got tagged will get notified. From this we can see the chain effect of Facebook, on how informations are disclosed and pass down. These people who are trying to sell something on Facebook also tend to hack into other people's account and start changing their profile pictures into their products' images without the users' consent.

By choosing to put our information online, and displaying them to the world, at that stage, we already choose to chuck part of our privacy away. Of course we can control and filter what sort of informations we want the others to know, but we cannot exactly expect that all our informations will be kept with us safe and sound.

I reckon, the only way to protect our privacy is to either not disclosing our informations online at all, or filter the ones you do not wish to publish and kept them somewhere real safe (which sadly, there isn't such thing yet online).

Privacy of the Public

With the topic of privacy over the past week, we've talked a couple of times about CCTV and its recorded monitoring of public locations. I know that this is quite a contested issue, that some feel this is an invasion of privacy that does not warrant the security it offers. Regardless, CCTV is widespread, and overall people accept that they will be monitored in many public places.

This got me thinking about how privacy is so dependent upon location, and furthermore, how this relates to privacy online. Physical locations explicitly define the public from the private: CCTVs are acceptable on the street, but definitely not inside the home. Of course online (specifically SNS), what is public and what is private isn't so defined as there is no traditional sense of location. Danah Boyd (from the set reading) talks about this 'grey area' of information privacy online: much of what is posted online is not private, but it is assumed that it will only be read by certain people.

On Facebook, for example, friends can comment on other friend's walls, but the comment reaches further people through news feeds, as well as being viewable by anyone with access to the wall. Just who a wall post will reach is actually pretty much unknown to the commenter, being dependent on a combination of privacy settings, friends lists, and networks. Sure there are privacy settings, but short of limiting all content to "friends only", privacy quickly becomes a murky term.

Facebook 'Places' is an interesting complication. To me, the idea seems to be a sort of combination of CCTV and SNS; the Facebook Places user can be tagged and their physical location shared (monitored). A part of me believes that (just like with CCTV) while in public locations, I can't expect my actions to be completely private. Yet the thought of being tagged on Facebook Places, and my location being traceable across online networks is somewhat unsettling. In a sense, this becomes another grey area of privacy: the knowledge of my location is public, but I also want some degree of privacy and control over this information.

Again, it seems Facebook is not only pushing the boundaries of privacy, but also pushing the boundaries of public information.

How to lose and not get a job: Facebook

There has been recent news in Germany of calls to ban employees from using social networking sites to discriminate new employees.

Although the attempt to legislate against employees using Facebook appears a little extreme, it represents an increasing and concerning trend.

What is happening in Germany, is an attempt to make this gray area strictly black and white.

By default, Facebook makes aspects of your profile open to users, allowing people to see your pictures and information. If you have nothing to hide, this won't affect your professional life. But there is always the threat that a friend will write an incriminating wallpost, or tag yourself in an unflattering photo or video.

Of course, the obvious thing to do would be to make your profile private.This might help the individual in the hiring process, but what about after you have been hired? But what if your colleague or employer adds you as a friend? A refusal to accept a request could cause an uncomfortable workplace, and cause as large a professional threat as that embarrassing photo.

I have had an employee tell me that he checks all candidates online, although I'm unaware of how thorough these checks were. For the employee, these checks were necessary for the credibility of the company. Furthermore, the job involved working closely with young children, and any trouble or ineptitude caused by employees would reflect poorly upon the company.

Fortunately, at the time I didn't have an online social networking profile. If this were to happen now, I think I would view it as an invasion of privacy, especially as an online profile wouldn't reflect my abilities. I'm troubled by the thought of strangers looking through your photos, already anticipating finding something negative. At the same time, I understand the position of employers, especially with children involved.

Although I'm still undecided on the issue, on this gray area, I'm leaning towards the side of privacy. Although it may seem a little naive and hopeful, I hope that similar action to Germany won't be required in other countries, but that employees will refrain from using Facebook to monitor employees, and if they do, that information they receive will be put in perspective. In the meantime, maybe don't tell the world you hate your boss.