Over the past two weeks, I’ve heard that now iconic word more times than I ever thought possible in passive conversation among teachers I had the opportunity to work with: Facebook. “Played it on… FB.” “Did you see her new pictures on FB? So cute!” “During lunch, I gotta get on FB!”
Of course, just a few weeks earlier, FB was in the news (if not casual conversations) due to issues relating to privacy settings. The company made news for making privacy complicated to control. What I personally found more troubling is that the company could not always honor its own privacy principles. Friends would tell me “My data is secure, I made all the right settings and de-friended the right people.” Meanwhile, the company reveals that private information was compromised for a short period of time.
Educator Liza Wiemer has recently published a post about the assumption that there is no real concept of “privacy” on a social network. She names our favorite FB (surprise!). This doesn’t surprise me, and I tend to agree with her thinking.
But while I’d be the last one to start defending the social network, I will say that the advice she gives is sound for almost any forum or space you may choose to communicate with online. Reading the hints seem like banal common sense. But for folks who have spent little time thinking about what publishing content to the online communities that now exist means, let alone “publishing” anything, they seem easily tripped up.
Where will we be with tools like these 5 or 10 years from now? I think it will be very interesting. For the conveniences of convening with our friends, we sacrifice time we had before not devoted to concerns about our own privacy. Mr. Zuckerberg (Facebook CEO) has said that the norms of privacy are changing. We’re becoming a more open society when we play online.
That’s not a bad thing, per se. But the balance of authenticity does not always play in our favor. And faking who you are can take its toll, too.
Our lives, as recorded in digital bits, will be more difficult to forget, from our best days to our worst. Those who care are those who either love us or despise us.