Aug 18 2008
facebook – anti-social networking?
Social networking sites are fast becoming an everyday feature of our lives – we use them to organise charity events, show our support in political elections, play games, and engage in a little ‘social stalking’. Social network sites like facebook raise questions of privacy and future consequence – will we regret posting photos of social activities and the comments we post on our friend’s walls when applying for jobs?
Some questions to think about during the readings:
- Before you begin the readings, I would like you to think about how often you use facebook (or, if you do at all), why/how you use it and your views on social networking sites in general.
- Are social networking sites an extension of ‘real life’ networks and can they exist without ‘real life’ interaction?
- Should employees and students be allowed access to these networking sites such as facebook during work and school hours? Are they merely a waste of time that results in productivity loss or can they benefit learning/working?
- Are those who don’t use social networking sites missing out? Do the pros out-weigh the cons for joining facebook?
- Several of the articles, as well as ‘The Truth about Facebook!’ clip, explore who has invested in facebook (and their connections to other organisations) and the issues surrounding privacy on facebook – does this effect your opinion of facebook? Will it change your behaviours on facebook?
[X] 60 Minutes – facebook (12 minutes)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UNrqz6X-AE
[X] danah boyd & Nicole Ellison – Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html
[X] Adam Joinson – ‘Looking at’, ‘Looking up’ or ‘Keeping up with’ People?
http://people.bath.ac.uk/aj266/pubs_pdf/1149-joinson.pdf
[X] Eszter Hargittai – Whose Space? Differences Among Users and Non-Users of Social Network Sites
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/hargittai.html
[X] Zeynep Tufekci – Grooming, Gossip, Facebook and Myspace: What Can We Learn About These Sites from Those Who Won’t Assimilate?
http://userpages.umbc.edu/~zeynep/papers/ZeynepSocialGroomingandFacebook.pdf
[X] Johnny Diaz – Facebook’s Squirmy Chapter
http://www.boston.com/jobs/news/articles/2008/04/16/facebooks_squirmy_chapter/
[X] Tom Hodgkinson – With friends like these …
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook/print
[X] Harvey Jones & Jose Hiram Soltren – facebook: Threats to Privacy
(actual article is only about 30 pages)
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/student-papers/fall05-papers/facebook.pdf
[X]Anita Ramasastry – On Facebook Forever? Why the Networking Site was Right to Change its Deletion Policies, And Why Its Current Policies Still Pose Privacy Risks
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/ramasastry/20080229.html
[X] Vishal – Agarwala – The Truth about facebook! (5 minutes)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B37wW9CGWyY
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So.
I’ve walked away from the tute feeling quite inspired to blog and generally join up with more of the internet in a non-facebook way. Furthermore, I’ve made my profile more private, and deleted a bunch of applications. Other than making these changes I’ve hardly touched my facebook since the tute, representing a much lower usage than usual.
Which has got me wondering why it’s only now that I’ve felt this way about things. I guess I was ignorant about a lot of the negative aspects of facebook, so is it right to assume everyone else using it is ignorant of them as well, or just don’t care? Because it really is useful having a free piece of internet that can act as a calendar, catch up with friends device and so on…
I think I wouldn’t even be feeling so spooked if it weren’t for the article talking about facebook as though it were part of some neo-con agenda. The way that a simple recommendation from a peer can be branded as an advertisement for a product is weird and doesn’t sit right with me. Yet ironically it seems like such a simple and non-commercial thing, to tell your friends to buy something you thought was good. I guess when it’s made explicit by an outside interest as having some definite purpose that it becomes insidious and something discomforting.
Yeah I also cleaned up my FB page a bit, applications-wise. It was the Ramastrasy article that made me think about that, as it seemed like a valid concern. And I’m thinking more about privacy in general, thanks to this seminar.
However, I’ve not used my facebook any less this week. See, it still allows me to keep in touch with some friends that I wouldn’t have much contact with otherwise. It depends on the friends, of course, but some use it a lot, and I am able to have email conversations via the mail function, or just drop them a line on their wall. It’s the efficiency of the wall that I like. I might not have anything significant to say, but we can connect on the site in a way that email just doesn’t quite match. I think it’s the centrality of the site, having so many people on one network; and I think it’s also the multiple functions that make it different to email. Cos I was thinking, well, email is also centralised, as long as you have all your friends’ addresses. And it’s more private and stuff. But facebook has an appeal (even without trashy applications) in ways like, you can display a photo or picture of yourself, and have a little bit of profile info (the less the better of course). It provides an online presence in a way that email can’t.
Oh and just to make this even longer: I joined last.fm the other day, completely unrelated to our discussions about social networking sites. I’m just interested to see whether it’s of any use to me.
A friend of mine told me his personal experience regarding the tagging function. Since his family members posted and tagged his graduation photos, he found that’s a bit embarrassing, because his Friends would be notified instantly on the photos (he claimed himself to be a low profile person). He asked me if there are ways to disable these notifications and reminded to be careful with adding Friends.
This conversation reminded me what we have talked about privacy during the seminar. We are actually being closely monitored by FB on what we are doing with our profiles and applications. Our Friends can trace nearly every single activity that we’ve done, except private messages. This is of course very convenient as we can update our Friends with just one website, but it also means that one has basically no secrets on FB unless s/he is careful enough to look through the privacy setting of the account. Now I really feel putting our phones numbers and addresses on FB is really dangerous, but you know, some of my friends who are studying abroad (like me) would put these info on FB as it would be easier for their friends to contact them. I don’t dare doing so……
For me, I still log on to FB nearly everyday, to update my Friends, but I am now more careful with my personal information.
Like Kiri, I’ve not used FB any lesser this week either, as I still do enjoy my fair of “stalking” fellow friends. I’ve always been pretty wary about these SNSs, thus, I don’t display much info. This brings me to the point of FB being a centralised platform for all to see (as Kiri mentioned). It is an efficient way of communicating with people when time and tide waits for no men in this society. Yes, it is true that email is also a centralised platform. FB just adds to the visual appeal as one can choose to add photos and juicy details.
It’s not just FB alone that has breached our privacy. In fact, (as mentioned in our class), we have unknowingly given away our information through other form, such as emails, online accounts etc etc. Yes, Chris, I guess this leads to the point of ignorance. We were once victims to these privacy issues. Now that we’re on a red alert, we’re more conscious of what we put up on these SNSs.
On the side note, I think it would be cool to place your boss and fellow colleagues (maybe?) under a specific group and alter the privacy settings. This would allow you to maintain the professional ‘you’ while updating your friends about the wild party you had last night (well, if you’re a party animal, that is!) =P
I was wondering about the ‘anti-socialness’ of FB. Jo said it’s cool to divide our Friends into different group so our bosses and colleagues won’t be able to peep through our night life. And I thought the purpose of FB is to socialize with friends and other people that we know? No doubt this is a good way to not get crossed with the boss and not letting him/her know our personal life, but it also means that we have blocked some of our Friends from the full profile, because we don’t want to let them know what we have done last night. So for an SNS that is so emphasize on sharing (practically everything) with Friends, this function seemed like a little bit funny.
One more thing, the other day my primary school mate (which we don’t know each other’s existence until very recently, thanks to FB) rejected to add me as his Friend because we don’t actually know each other, definitely anti-social… =(
“I might not have anything significant to say, but we can connect on the site in a way that email just doesn’t quite match.”
This little comment that Kiri wrote jogged my memory about a little article I read a while ago, and I’m trying to search for it to put it here, because it seems kind of relevant. Basically it’s a little bit of theory about meta-communication in conversations, and now with what Kiri’s said I can see how that opens up some appeal for facebook.
It says (and I paraphrase) that the bulk of conversations aren’t really about their topic, but about opening and maintaining lines of communication with the other person. To put it differently, when you bump into someone on the street and talk about the weather, both of you can plainly see that it is sunny today, but has been raining previously, and you worry that the sunny times won’t last, or whatever, and it’s pretty humdrum to talk about. What you’re meta-saying to each other is “I like you, I’m willing to take a few moments out of my busy day to engage with you, I value your companionship and just in case you were worried we were drifting apart, this conversation tells you I hope to redress this.”
So, just as Kiri said, on facebook you have a pretty good platform for having this sort of meta-conversation, in the form of wall posts. So you can keep the channels of communication open with people you value without the restriction of having to be in the same time and place, as Jo said. Also you can find someone from your past and do the same thing.
I’m not quite sure how to tie this back to the whole security and privacy debacle that we’ve mostly been talking about, but it’s early on a Sunday morning, so maybe I’ll try again later in the day.
It’s interesting how we’ve all pretty much reacted in the same way as the students did in the ‘experiment’ Tama conducted with his students, because even through they increased their privacy and deleted some applications, this still doesn’t really change the amount of information that is available to companies. I guess its just a knee-jerk reaction to try and stop/undo any damage that may have been done?
I think Chris brings up a great point about meta-conversation. Most of us use facebook everyday, and as much as we’d like to think that our lives are exciting and ever-changing, not that much can really happen in a 24 hour period. So, what are we actually doing writing on our friends walls all the time (most of who we’ve just seen or will be seeing that day)? We want them to know that we’re thinking about them and we value our friendship!
In terms of facebook being anti-social (we didn’t get to cover that point as much as I would have liked in the seminar, sorry guys!), that was mainly based around the Tom Hodgkinson article, With friends like these …, and his comment of “Why on God’s earth would I need a computer to connect with the people around me?”. Personally, facebook has made me MORE social and connect with more people and more often. But it does raise the question of whether we should be calling each other or organising to meet up with people instead of just letting them know what’s happening in our lives in a few (very public) lines on their wall?
…turns out we weren’t the only ones unaware of the privacy settings on facebook
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=623534
With Alex’s question in mind, a scenario started playing in my head: It’s a bright and cheery Saturday morning. You suddenly thought of your best friend and wondered what she was up to. Instead of picking up your handphone to give her a buzz, you head towards your computer and drop a few lines on the FB wall. You get a reply from her on your FB wall and feel satisfied. You feel like you know everything that’s happened to her/him during that week.
How many of you are actually guilty of such an action? Where you’d rather spend time in front of a computer catching up with your friends instead of going out with them? I admit I’m guilty of such an action. In some ways, SNS has made us more social (by catching with long lost friends) but at the same time, it makes us a social hermit. I think that we still do need to go out and socialise with our friends as we still need to upkeep our social skills and EQ (!!!).
Why do we have to watch our language if it’s just for fun? Hudson certainly makes me feel like FB can be likened to a person speaking through a microphone such that people within 123455km radius can hear what you are saying.
Hmm, could this privacy issue actually stun the growth of SNS? (Have we talked about this in class already???)
Speaking through a microphone heard within a 123455km radius…an interesting simile…
Chris, the aspect of communication via FB that you’ve picked up on (from my post) is the one that I find most intriguing, so that info about meta-communication resonates strongly with me! Thanks! It’s very true about those flippant little conversations about the weather and daily activities – I have friends who occasionally bemoan the blandness of small talk and wish for meaningful, purposeful conversation all the time. To which I’ve sometimes replied that sure, if small talk is all you ever do it’s boring. But all the same, it’s so necessary – it’s social lubricant. For people we’ve not met before it means we don’t have to be open and vulnerable before we know we can trust them; and for old friends, good friends, it allows us to relax and, yes, to communicate that they matter enough that you would spend time talking inconsequentially with them. Gosh, how interesting human interaction can be!…And so much of it is happening on SNSs and I wonder how much we transfer our material world practices to virtual communication. Jo’s scenario of choosing FB first as a way to speak to a friend would be an example of that. But I think there still is/will be a gradual change toward primarily virtual communication. I, for one, would probably use my phone to msg a friend as the first option, simply because it’s likely to be in my pocket, being so small and all. Maybe when/if internet on the mob reaches similar capabilities to PCs we will log on to FB while out on a walk, but not yet.
The conversation about meta-communication is an interesting one, but I wonder if there is a critical mass of “friends” which overwhelms FB’s utility in this regard? I know I’ve got a lot of people I’m ostensibly friends with who are really contacts, colleagues or some other relationship, but my FB feed displays a mix of these and edits out a lot I don’t see unless I click through to specific people’s pages. For me, this is when FB stopped being as useful – and yet the social awkwardness of unfriending, say, 100 people to make FB more useful really prevents me from doing so. That said, I often wish I had the tenacity of my friend and colleague Jean Burgess who deleted her FB profile and posted an eloquent explanation of her reasons for doing so.
Also, Alex, good spotting with the Nikki Hudson story. I’m beginning to think that understanding and being able to enact privacy in online communication is one of the core literacies which divides those digitally literate from those who are not.
Like Jean, I have lately (yes, even previous to planning the seminar) been feeling the burden of facebook, to the point where I actually considered deactivating it for a week just to give me a little rest and see whether I could actually live without it!
I do feel that my social world is dependent on facebook (or at least would suffer a mighty blow without it), most of my friends no longer send invites via mail or sms, they simply create an event on facebook.
If something is becoming a burden, should it be given up?
It is my own fault that I have let facebook ‘rule’ my life, my friends are use to replies within a few hours and will send frantic messages to my phone asking what’s happened if I don’t… causing me to check facebook several times a day.
Much like checking e-mails, can facebook make it difficult to separate one’s self from the their work or social worlds, to the point where it feels like you need to be available to everyone, all the time…
That’s well interesting Tama, it made me think about the irony of a critical mass for facebook friends. Facebook’s success seems mostly based on the fact that it’s quite all encompassing, that a lot of people have one. And the more people that there are, the more you can do with them – organising events through facebook makes little sense if only 2 of the guests will be reading that invitation.
I guess that’s a good distinction between the meta-communication and regular communication in facebook. In fact, now I think of it, letting people know about events serves a more…specific and overt function that chatting about the weather. Also, to my way of thinking, status updates and the like aren’t really working in the meta-field of communication. It’s more just someone broadcasting with no intent of establishing or maintaining a connection with their friends. The warm, nice lovey type feelings come in when someone comments on your status, because they’re opening a channel with you, replying and having more of a conversation.
Which brings me to where I read the piece about meta-communication, it was in a book on semantics by Kate Kearns (a linguist from New Zealand) which is pretty available, the library has a copy but it’s probably in closed reserve, and it’s talking about pragmatics in conversations, which I think is what wall posts and to a lesser degree, photo comments replicate.
ok, so here is the notice I recieved from facebook:
———
Hello,
We have removed your video entitled “Sherlock & Watson” uploaded at 3:21am June 9th, 2008. We did this because we learned that your video might include copyrighted material owned by a third party, such as a video clip or background audio.
If you are the copyright owner, or have permission from the rights holder to upload and distribute this material on Facebook, you may file a counter notice of alleged infringement by following the link below.
Please note that if you re-upload this video without filing a counter notice, or if you upload another video that infringes on the rights of a third party, our system will again remove the content. This could cause your access to the Facebook Video application to be disabled, or your Facebook account to be disabled.
To file a counter notice:
File a Counter Notification
For Facebook’s video removal policy:
View the Policy
The Facebook Team
copyright@facebook.com
———
this was actually posted on my home tab this afternoon (after having already been sent one through me e-mail) and just I am writing this I have recieved another e-mail telling me another of my videos is being taken down.
both videos included audio clips that were not my own (but in fact were by madness and the police), so its obvious why they’ve been taken down…. but still, not impressed facebook. not impressed at all.