Isa's Response to Newspaper Article

The newspaper article discusses the problems associated with the use of social networking sites, mainly Facebook. The article makes the statement that teenagers may need to change their names in the future due to the information that they have shared in the past. By doing so teenagers can create a positive image for themselves so their future career applications look bright.

The privacy of information has been tested with sites such as Facebook and MySpace. There appears to be more and more information that is being released than in the past. The most obvious reason for this is due to the participatory culture that social sites rely on (Dezuanni, 2010a) leading to an increase in the availability of information. By making this information available, sites push the boundaries of the privacy policy ensuring that authorities will step in to curb this process.

Teens need to be wary of information that they provide to organisations that are internet based as not all people have the same ethics (James et al, 2008). Clearly banks, universities and schools require this information to create unique identifiers for these people but sites that are free should not have privilege to this data. When teens place information up on social networking sites they give up control over how the information is used (Dezuanni, 2010c). Not only should teens be made aware of this through school and community groups but they should start to use fake names.

The article also mentions the use of face recognition technology. Companies can use this in the future to check up on possible employees. If the photos portray the potential employee in a bad position then there could be detrimental effect on the employment situation. The precariousness of the situation must be understood by teenagers. This is an ethical and legal ramification for people who use social sites and educational institutions should examine this issue with students (Dezuanni, 2010b). Teenagers must emphasize control over this to ensure that face recognition will not be a problem.

The article does appear to be trying to cause a stir as articles such as James et al (2008) and Boyd (2008) are convinced that teenagers are gigirally literate. That said, neither article has examined face recognition technology with social networking sites. Thus the issues raised may be valid. Teenagers need to understand how the media works and effectively engage in this participatory culture without becoming a victim of it.

References

Dezuanni, M. (2010a). CLN647 Youth, Popular Culture and Texts: Week 1 [Lecture Notes]. Retrieved July 22, 2010 from http://blackboard.qut.edu.au/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id=_2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_64558_1%26url%3D

Dezuanni, M. (2010b). CLN647 Youth, Popular Culture and Texts: Week 3 [Lecture Notes]. Retrieved August 2, 2010 from http://blackboard.qut.edu.au/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id=_2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_64558_1%26url%3D

Dezuanni, M. (2010c). CLN647 Youth, Popular Culture and Texts: Week 9 [Lecture Notes]. Retrieved September 25, 2010 from http://blackboard.qut.edu.au/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id=_2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_64558_1%26url%3D

Dudley-Nicholson, J. (2010). Google ignites debate about privacy. Retrieved August 30, 2010 from http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/technology/google-ignites-debate-about-privacy/story-e6frep1o-1225907943228

James, C., Davis, K., Flores, A., Francis, J.M., Pettingill, L., Rundle, M., & Gardner, H. (2008). Young People, Ethics, and the New Digital Media: A Synthesis from the Good Play Project. GoodWork Project Report Series, 54, 1-62. Retrieved August 5, 2010, from
http://blackboard.qut.edu.au/webapps/blackboard/content/contentWrapper.jsp?attachment=true&navItem=content&content_id=_3235259_1&displayName=Reading+4+-+Young+People%2C+Ethics+and+the+New+Digital+Media&course_id=_64558_1&href=/%40%40/2705D7B1EBCA39391F7AA5DE241D750D/courses/1/CLN647_10se2/content/_3235259_1/GoodWorkPaper54.pdf

Newspaper from Nadia Facebook and privacy issue

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/facebooks-scary-secret-20101007-169ni.html

Radical transparency is an open environment that fosters openness and sharing.  Zuckerberg believes that privacy is passé and it is no longer the social norm. In some respects this is true as people are sharing personal aspects of their lives with a much wider audience than every before. Weber  in James et al (2008 p. 22)  notes that to many youth "public is the new private: young people often realise that their blogs and homepages are public and accessible, but they trust that only their peers are interested enough to view them", although Facebook in general has tighter security than most blogs this quote highlights the mind set of many young people and their approach to their digital footprint.  The advent of Facebook opened up the chapters of people’s lives to a much wider community. What constitutes as a ‘friend’ in social networking seems to vary wildly from person to person. Livingston's (2008) report on teens and their social networking experiences and has documented that teens frequently are willing to have people that they didn’t like as one of the ‘friends’ purely so there would be no awkwardness in their off-line lives and can maintain their peer network. As a result many individuals are sharing intimate expressions of their selves with people they don’t necessarily have any interest in.  This is only one of the ways that our private lives are being transformed by social networking.

Social networking is a marketers dream come true, there is a wealth of data that pinpoints exactly where you are when you make a purchase or create an experience. Lately I’ve noticed that some of my friends have been geotagging their location in Facebook, perhaps I’m old fashioned but I don’t necessarily want everyone and ‘anyone’ including my friends, knowing where I am at any given moment only to be able to predict where I may be. I find this decidedly creepy.

We are giving our social networking community and Facebook more than just a geotagged collation of our travels and experiences, we are telling them exactly what brands we align ourselves with by using the ‘like’ function. This allows marketers to get an exact snapshot of the demographic that we sit in so that our consumerist dreams can be created for us.

An important aspect of Hutcheon's article is where he comments that there is a wealth of data that is collected that we can’t even begin to imagine “we have no way of knowing what has been collected, recombined, shared and stashed in places we never knew existed”.

Cloud computing is fast becoming a wonderful way of collaborating and freeing up space on our work and home computers, Google search facility and Google Chrome amoungst others record all manner of searching and computer use. The future certainly does look like it is moving toward a way of using information that is radically different from the past. 

As long as we as educators continue to give our students guided social networking experiences our classrooms will be filled with discussions about what this means in terms of privacy and on the flip-side, what it means for their voice, which now has so many opportunities to be heard.

 


Hutcheon, S (2010) Facebook's Scary Secret. http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/facebooks-scary-secret-20101007-169ni.html

James, C., &  Davis, K, flores, A, Francis, J,Pettingill, L, Rundle, M, Gardner, H. (2009). Young people, ethics, and the new digital media. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Livingstone, S. (2008). Taking risky opportunities in youthful content creation: Teenagers' use of social networking sites for intimacy, privacy and self-expression. New Media & Society, 10(3), 393.