Social networking

I’m sure this is old news to many, but I’ve been reading about the US National Security Agency’s plans to fund research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And the point is that we’re choosing to make information about ourselves available online.

As it happens, I was reading and pondering this at about the same time as I decided to take a look at MySpace and Facebook. Thinking about privacy issues didn’t stop me from creating accounts on both these sites! I did look at some of the questions you can answer to create a profile, though.

On MySpace you can tell the world how you choose to label your sexuality, whether you believe in a religion or not, who your heroes are, and so on. So if I said I was a gay atheist and then tried to get a job in a school run by a religious group that might have a problem with gays or atheists that might be a bit of a problem. I could lie during the interview, but it’s always possible that I could be sprung later by someone happening upon my MySpace profile. (And then there’s the issue of lying in the first place.)

Similarly, on Facebook, you can label your relationship status and where you consider yourself to stand in the political spectrum, from very liberal, through to very conservative, and apathetic (at least it’s realistic!). Would you want to list your relationship status as being ‘complicated’? (I don’t even know what that means!) Because Facebook is a social networking site for university students and alumni, you have to have a working email address associated with a .edu domain to sign up. Your email address automatically makes you a part of a network associated with your particular university.

From my Facebook profile you can see how over-educated I am, but I don’t have email addresses associated with a couple of the universities I’ve studied at, so it’s going to be a bit more tricky to find my former classmates (I’ll have to remember their names). For graduates to be able to sign up as alumni of a particular university, it does mean that universities need to offer ongoing email accounts to graduates, though. And I wonder how aware our university alumni offices are of this site – it could be a very interesting way of keeping track of current students as well as alumni.

I like the look and layout of Facebook better than MySpace (see my MySpace profile for comparison). MySpace definitely has a teen feel to it, with lots of ads for downloadable smiley faces and mobile phone ringtones. At times I found it a bit difficult to navigate between screens after editing stuff. And I’m quite surprised that the site doesn’t make it easier for people to customise their pages – although judging from some of the profiles that are available out there many users have worked out how to do this, and are doing it quite successfully.

I think it’s quite important for parents and teachers to be educating their children about the things they should and shouldn’t be publishing about themselves on these sites. In the years to come we will no doubt have some politician or celebrity getting into hot water for the sorts of information they chose to share on MySpace or Facebook or some other similar site. One profile I saw on Facebook described the user as someone who eats “hundred dollar bills for breakfast everyday just so my crap is worth more than yours”. Charming, and so mature!

Categories: socialnetworking, Facebook, MySpace