During this week's tutorial we had some discussion about Facebook and the problems with having so much personal information on the web. One person mentioned that they've used social networking sites to check out potential employees. Another had some problems with a boss who wanted to become their Facebook friend. A colleague of mine also discussed with me the difficult predicament he'd found himself in when married friends separated and he wasn't sure of the correct etiquette for dealing with the divorcees online.
A recent Sydney Morning Herald headline read Facebook murder rocks 'perfect little family'. On closer reading it would appear that the truth of the matter it was actually an, unfortunately not too uncommon, domestic situation. Facebook did play a part in the story but certainly not the part that the headline would have you believe. It is interesting how new technology is often met with this type of fear and distrust.
It is also interesting how people fail to utilise these new technologies with that same regard for their own privacy and personal safety as they would apply in the rest of their lives. There is so much to be gained from virtual communities that it seems wrong to blame the technology for the stupidity or recklessness of its users. Apparently these problems are facing more and more members of online communities. On May 12 2008 radio show Hack did a story about employees who have faced consequences as serious as being fired for airing their thoughts about their bosses publicly, via social networking sites. Harmers Workplace Lawyers rightly pointed out that employees need to be careful when posting on the internet.
I wholeheartedly agree that online communities can be difficult to make sense of. I do occasionally cringe at the personal correspondence, between distant acquaintances of mine, that I am privy to. That said, I also agree that we should not have to sensor ourselves. There is a good argument that negative comments made about a boss on Facebook should be taken as seriously by management as genuine disquiet from employees about that boss, after all where there's smoke there's often fire. And that all-in-all dealing with friend requests from "a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy" (Doctorow cited in Bruns, 2008) or your boss does require a great deal of tact and understanding of the virtual culture in which you are participating.
One thing that we all probably agree on it that there is much development of the technology to come. Perhaps to this end necessity will be the mother of invention and the technology will enable use to keep our prying bosses out of our weekend capers and our cool Creative Industries Faculty buddies from knowing that you actually enjoy your work doing data entry in the accounts department at BHP Billiton. Bruns points to an already develops such, Ning, which deals with these problems in perhaps the most sensible manner: it makes the technology solve the problem. I think the answer to this question my question is that it's a bit of both. The technology will evolve to suit our needs and we will also evolve as users. Hopefully we will learn that we cannot publicly discredit the boss. For if we do, we run the risk losing our job.
References:
Bruns, A. (2008). Social Networks on Ning: A Sensible Alternative to Facebook. Snurblog. Retrieved May 12, 2008, from http://snurb.info/node/801
7 comments:
I believe I was the one with the boss that wanted to add me as a friend. Thomas so kindly used my blog as an example for his tutorial classes.
I don't actually believe that facebook is the devil. Facebook has its upsides and obviously it is very popular. However, as it grows in popularity the more uncomfortable i feel with its structure. For example: say i meet "Jane" on the bus to uni one day because she happens to get on with a friend of mine. The next day i log on to Facebook to discover a friend request from Jane. Naturally i accept, being the lovely kind person that I am. Upon accepting her friend request i have instantly allowed her to view a great deal of personal information about me. If it was a real life situation I would have shared that information with Jane slowly over time..or not shared it at all depending on how much Jane and i got along. Facebook is undermining how we interact and distinguish between friends and acquaintances in real life. It's flattened structure doesn't allow me to slowly give out information to Jane as we get to know each other. In fact there is hardly a "getting to know you" phase at all. Jane will start out with an impression of who I am from my Facebook and i then have to work backwards to either prove i am that person or there is in fact more to me than what met her Facebook eye.
If you're interested, check out Axel's blog on Facebook which sparked my thoughts on this to begin with. http://snurb.info/node/801
I was suspended from Facebook for two days. I have a group there and I decided to message the people in my group who are in my friend list and in the QUT network (they can see my profile). Their system saw this as incorrect use of a feature, sent a warning email to my account, but two messages after and I have been suspended!
If it weren't for the fact that I need it for my professional development, it wouldn't be such a big deal, but it was! Just as Emma Marie is uncomfortable about the structure of Facebook and issues relating to privacy, I am uncomfortable at the fact that my (brief) banishment from that site has given me a strong reaction as I cannot access and fully take advantage of a large social networking medium.
The same can be said to other sites such as Google. Refer to this article about websites blacklisted by Google: http://www.anthillonline.com/article_detail.php?id=614
I think that it is a mixture of both user action/responsibility and the site structure. My user action for sending those messages where within reason yet the site structure saw it as unreasonable. With the Google example, the user action with the official Republican Party site was bad grammar and spelling and Google's search structure blacklisted that site due as it was "riddled with syntactical errors" (Bajar 2008).
References:
Bajar, R. 2008. When Google Tells You to Get Lost in ‘Australian Anthill. http://www.anthillonline.com/article_detail.php?id=614 (Accessed May 7 2008).
In regards to my previous post...I didn't notice that they sent a warning email, hence the continued messaging.
Despite being a fairly frequent Facebooker, of my 191 friends, I have 146 of them on the “limited profile” category. It seems that I too have all sorts of issues with the concept of Facebook etiquette. However, I'm very interested in the idea that every day we are learning a new language as it were - a new way of interacting with one another. What strikes me most about the Facebook revolution is how no one has yet (that I know of) to write a book of social networking ethics – how to behave in an online environment. Everything we know about social interaction on the internet, we’ve learned somehow either through following real world patterns or have grasped intuitively as a way to conduct oneself. As an observational sociology experiment, it would be really interesting to see how people treat one another in the real world and the virtual one. How one could do this, I don’t rightly know, but the results would be fascinating.
Axel himself has all kinds of queasy feelings about Facebook, and technosocial interaction: http://snurb.info/node/705. I personally agree with many of his points, but I’m having too much damn fun checking out how people who used to bully me in high school are now fat and single. A violation of Facebook protocols? Or just a real world reflection of real world feelings? The one thing I seem to be taking away from this unit is how virtual cultures are merely a reflection of real world cultures. Maybe it’s as simple as that.
Interesting post Isha. You do raise some delicate issues where the blame is pointed at Facebook. But Facebook is definitely not the devil and never will be.
Facebook is simply yet another social networking interface in which people may interact, share, meet or keep in contact with people. It is up to the user in how they take the program and make use of it. Profiles can be set to private and you do have the right to de-friend someone, at the end of the day the Facebook user has chosen to sign up, they also have to choice to delete their account if online happenings become a bit too heavy or difficult to deal with.
It would have be great if you have included hyperlinks to some of the examples you blogged about, for example the Sydney Morning Herald article.
On employees discrediting their bosses online, no matter if slander is spoken via SMS, day to day conversation, or online on a personal blogg- defaming you boss is not an entirely smart thing to do.
You said, “we should not have to sensor ourselves,” but perhaps we do need to. Publishing bloggs is similar to publishing an article in the newspaper and defamation is a crime.
I agree that we need to examine the ramifications of meeting socially in a virtual world. Things do happen faster and we meet up with people both past and present whom we would not otherwise have met and have people like our bosses, accessing information they would otherwise not be privy to.
Virtual social networks are clearly introducing a need to establish a clear consensus on social etiquette in and social mores for the virtual world. We have them in the real world to moderate our behaviour so it is hardly surprising we need them virtually.
While I agree that it’s somewhat therapeutic to finally find a space where we do not have to censor ourselves and therefore experience the true freedom of being ourselves, untrammelled by the limitations imposed by non-verbal communication in the real world, I believe that a bit of personal responsibility and limit setting is appropriate regardless of the medium we meet in.
Technology will evolve to optimise the virtual world but I think it is important that it does not just evolve in response to technical empowerment but also in recognition of the importance of protecting the social and psychological safety of users in a space that has fewer limitations than the world we live in.
It is interesting to note that with all new technologies, similar moral panics, of the same nature, always arises. These accusations and blame over social problems are almost always shifted onto new media. This is not new at all.
Since the emergence of mass media as seen when printing press first emerged, similar moral panics always arises. Moral panics are also especially predominant amongst media that is popular with young people, giving them greater authority and power to wider audiences, and which decentralises social power. With a medium such as facebook, where so much power is given to the youth, naturally there will be a massive upsurge in moral panic surrounding it. If we take a lesson from history.
The problem here, is not Facebook, but rather, how it is utilised. As with any medium, one should always be careful with the type of information one discloses.
Thus, I disagree with the statement that 'we should not censor ourselves'. Similar to the fact that we would not reveal everything about ourselves to a complete stranger, it would be dangerous to do so on Facebook, an online medium accessible by many.
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