Whine Whine

Don't you hate it when you're supposed to go to a friend's wedding celebration this weekend, but you lost the invitation, so you can neither remember nor find out when you're supposed to show up?

At least we have Facebook. The information is probably on there somewhere.

Don't you also hate it when you get a coupon for some product you wouldn't mind trying, but then you find out it doesn't exist?

I got this coupon for almond milk, and figured what the heck, I enjoy a non-dairy beverage from time to time, I'll give this particular brand and product a shot.

Then at the store, on looking more closely, I find that the coupon is for $1 off 86 ounces of almond milk. What kind of bizarrely sized container is that?

A half gallon is 64 ounces, and that is the largest container of this product that I could see on the shelf. Am I supposed to get a half gallon and then add a 22-ounce container and buy them together? Because I didn't see any 22-ounce containers either.

Look, company: if you want me to be enticed by your coupons into buying your product, you're going to have to actually sell the thing you give me a coupon for. Otherwise I'll just walk away and complain about it later to the internet.

I'm not sure Facebook can help out with this one...although the brand may have a page that I could go complain on. I should check.

Perhaps Facebook is indeed the solution to all problems!

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Hold On, Let Me Tell the World Something

T.Scott has an interesting take on the Facebook privacy issue in this post descriptively titled "It May As Well Be On the Front Page of the NYT."

The post suggests that the problem is not necessarily about privacy or lack of privacy, it's whether expectations of privacy match up with reality. If you go into something like Facebook with limited expectations, and a policy of assuming that everything you post online could be seen by everyone in the world, you'll have fewer unpleasant surprises. (Except possibly, depending on your level of extroversion, how little everyone in the world cares.)

This rings true for me to some extent, possibly because I also have pretty much tended to assume that anything I post could be seen by anyone, even though in reality almost no one cares. And in general things are in fact fairly private, in the sense that if you're one of several million people talking to themselves in public, you're relatively safe even if you're talking about your darkest secrets, because what are the odds that anyone who knows you is going to hear? Among multitudes lies anonymity.

That said, I don't talk about my darkest secrets (which I assure you are so blood-curdling and hair-raising that even to tap the keys required to describe them would send me into conniptions right here), because you never can tell.

Someone could always come along and overhear at any time, even if they never did before (especially given the archival nature of web communication), and I think it's wise to remember that. I also do think that some people may have unrealistic expectations of how close-to-the-vest their information actually is out there on the social web, on blogs, networking sites, ratings sites, etc.

On the other hand, to look at a slightly different angle on the question, I feel sympathy for people who may themselves post cautiously but wind up appearing online in the indiscreet posts of other people. You definitely hear things like "I don't even have a Facebook account, but my bitter ex-boyfriend is using his to post drunken photos of me!", and that really does seem like a problem.

You can control your own online behavior, but may have no control over what someone else does, and other people can make your secrets just as public as you can if they have the information.

Which gets into non-Facebook issues like "be careful who you trust with your secrets," and I guess would technically be a legal issue (who owns a person's image/info and has a right to post it?--can you make them stop?) rather than strictly one of privacy policies.

Because it might well be against a policy to post pictures of people who don't want you to, but it's not as if Facebook is going to be requiring signed consent forms for every photo posted. It would have such an inhibiting effect on people posting photos at all that Facebook would probably lose members to Flickr or someplace that didn't have such a requirement, and there you are. You can't be losing members! Those precious, precious eyeballs and tidbits of personal, advertise-to-able information are the blood of life.

It's just a lot easier for random stuff you say or do to be seen by everyone in the world these days, and I do understand the plaint that it sucks to basically be told you have to be careful about everything you do or say everywhere, because someone else might catch you on their cellphone camera, even if you've always been the soul of discretion online.

Its one thing to assume everything you post online might as well be on the cover of the New York Times, and another to live your life assuming that you could also be the subject of someone else's NYT piece at any moment. Are we all tiny celebrities potentially being stalked by part-time paparazzi?

It's an interesting world.

But overall, yes, I agree with the original post: assume everything you put online is public! Wildly, outrageously public! Everyone in the world is looking at it right now!

At the same time, lest that give you an inflated sense of self-importance, you should also assume that no human eye will ever see it.

This is a nice bit of mental gymnastics that I like to think will help keep the brain in shape.

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Yup, That's Me

I see on Well and PsychCentral that someone did a study and found that the way people present themselves on Facebook is generally an accurate view of their personality.

It doesn't say what personality traits are expressed by failure to log into Facebook and update your profile on a regular basis, but presumably neglectfulness, distance, and lack of caring for others.

For shame, me. Why am I not on that that site five times a day like a normal, sociable person capable of engaging with others?

And in examples of Facebook's usefulness, I enjoyed GruntDoc's post about someone being late to work and one course of action being "I’ll poke him on Facebook" to remind him.

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Don't Forget to Write

I like this post on Slate's doubleX blog, in which Mimi Swartz talks about using some of those nifty new technologies kids these days like to keep in touch with her son in college.

As she says, when we were in college back in the old days, you called your parents now and then, on their landlines of course since that was all there was, and maybe wrote an occasional letter, using the post office of course since that was all there was (well, in my day we did have email), but really regular contact wasn't common.

Now, it seems, Facebook, text messaging, etc. let you stay a little more in touch with family members in other places--not like long fireside chats every evening, but you can casually check in whenever the mood strikes, keeping caught up with the this-and-that of life. I think that's cool.

Of course, by the time today's wee kids go off to college, we'll be keeping in touch via telepathy-chips that will make Twitter look like notes in bottles (I guess it's kind of like notes in bottles already, except that anyone who wants to can fish them out of the ocean anytime), but meanwhile...we make due.

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Declarations

There are various interesting social issues arising from Facebook (the awkwardly public breakup via Relationship Status changes is often referenced). One I haven't seen addressed before comes in a post on Feministe about how best to react when the birth mother of your child posts a picture of said child on her page.

It's another demonstration of the way that the complexities of human connections become evident in different ways when we can make public statements about who we know and our relationships with them.

I mean, if you give birth to a child and know where it is and keep track of its growing up, you're bound to feel some connection, but it's probably fairly private. It's real, it's complicated, but it's mostly known to you, your close friends, family, the adoptive parents of the child.

If you can make these statements to the general world--look, here's a child I gave birth to and feel a connection with even though I'm not raising her!--that's another thing.

Not, I think, necessarily a bad thing, but a new one, at least on this scale. I've come across the idea that the web makes social life more like it was in small towns in the old days, where anyone who cares can know all about you.

There are positive and negative sides to this, as to anything, but it's an interesting thought.

Different Sides of Online Tracks

Interesting post on Feministing about "The Online Class Divide," specifically the ways that MySpace and Facebook have divided up the online social networking world.

Or, more to the point, the way that people have segregated themselves on the two sites...largely along racial and class lines, according to the argument here. I signed up for Facebook just because it was the one promoted on the university website when I started grad school--I didn't realize I was following trends established by my social status.

I suppose one often doesn't.

In Other Pressing News--

I am deeply concerned about this peanut butter issue. Sure, at the moment it's just products made with peanut butter, but I fear for the safety of the peanut butter itself.

Peanut butter is one of the several food groups for me. I depend on peanut butter! 

Also today, I enjoyed a high-tech (though rather low-quality) viewing of the inauguration via streaming video from various sites. I particularly appreciated CNN's link with Facebook, which allowed viewers of the video feed to also post Facebook status updates that showed up alongside the image. 

It was like a little online party, with back and forth comments about what people were seeing. Or not seeing. The video feed, clearly overloaded, was patchy at best for me, so I missed most of the actual swearing in.

Still, it was a fun way to do it, sharing the event with friends. Maybe next big event, livestreaming TV will have come into its own and we'll do this again. 

Sure Sign of Something

I've started getting a lot of spam messages referencing Facebook. 

Like, "Melinda sent you a message on Facebook." 

They may have been around before, but I don't recall getting them before this week. Has Facebook finally reached a critical mass of users, such that it's efficient to try to lure people to open messages pretending to come from it?

Sure, I personally think "Who the heck is Melinda? Also, why is this in my Junk folder, and why does the return address contain a weird(er than usual) string of letters and numbers?" but someone with a less effective spam filter, or who knows a Melinda, might well go ahead and open the message. 

And then purchase the pharmaceutical knockoffs or incur the virus infection or whatever the message is about. So very clever, these spammers.

I guess that's a sign of cultural relevance for Facebook. Or something.

Protecting You from Socialization

Stephen's Lighthouse reports the weird fact that the Calgary airport, while it offers free wireless internet (which is certainly good) blocks access to Twitter and Facebook.

Hmm. I don't know, this just seems bizarre to me. I suppose it's based on that panicky idea of social networking sites as seething swamps filled with sex predators trying to befriend naive children, and the airport doesn't want to risk an outcry? (After all, where better than an airport to lure a child into a restroom...OK, I'm just going to stop.)

Because otherwise, what are the airport tech people trying to do? Protect people from possibly missing their flight announcements because they're so enthralled with posting status updates? 

The post does not report on the accessibility or otherwise of MySpace, Orkut, Friendster or any others; presumably they're blocked as well. 

Seems a strange thing to be concerned about. But hey, free wireless, I guess, and you know what they say about beggers and their ability to be choosers.

Let Us Once More Consider Facebook

I don't even spend that much time on Facebook (I swear! six or seven hours a day, tops!), but I do seem to frequently find other people talking about it and want to chip in.

This time, librarian.net recommended a paper called "Facebook and the Social Dynamics of Privacy," and said paper proved very interesting. 

The author, James Grimmelmann, offers some good background information on social networking, and a solid discussion of the ways that interactions with other people and use of applications on Facebook can build up a fairly detailed picture of who you are.

Your name and location, who you know and their names and locations, any additional personal details you care to post, the kinds of relationships you have with the people you know (do you often 'poke' certain people, exchange 'gifts' with others, play games with others?), can all be seen through your profile and actions.

The kinds of things you think are interesting, and thus, in a sense, who you are, will also show up in the status messages you post, the kinds of games you choose to play, the gift-images and poke-messages you send, the 'Cause' pages you subscribe to and the institutions you declare yourself a fan of, and so on.

He talks about the fact that this picture of you is not entirely under your control as a Facebook user, since even if you keep your own privacy controls set to high, other people can leave their profiles open (or make them public at any time without consulting you), including any statements you've written on their 'wall,' pictures tagged as you on other peoples' pages, comments about you, etc.

I liked the discussion about peoples' motivations for giving away so much information on these sorts of sites. The article says that there's a natural interest in being able to control the way that other people see you: people want to look good to others, and being able to present yourself on a site with a personal profile of carefully chosen details and images is an appealingly straightforward way to do this.

It's plainly also true that social networking sites are good for, well, networking socially: keeping in touch with friends, making new connections, getting to know more about acquaintances. 

There's strong presentation of the idea that the value of social networking depends on people sharing information: you need buy-in, you need people to be on the site, using its tools and playing with its applications, or else there's no point. These sites are interesting and can be fun and useful, and that value depends on having a mass of users willing to put in the time and share the information.

But there are also real concerns about sharing too much information, making too much available about yourself or someone else. The article suggests that we tend to assume much more privacy than we really have: we think we're posting pictures and comments for our friends, and don't really keep in mind the fact that things posted on the internet can be rapidly disseminated much more widely. 

Similarly, we assume that something we send to another person will be received the way we meant it ("clearly, that comment about Betty was just between you and me!"), while in fact, without the clues of expression and tone that we get in face to face conversation, the person may take the message to be public, or neutral, and see nothing wrong with passing it on.

We've all heard stories about people who were refused jobs because their potential employers saw pictures of them mixing martinis for children or whatever, and a lot of the users of these sites are surely not much concerned with whether such-and-such personnel manager for a company they'll want to work for in ten years but haven't heard of yet is going to think their profiles are as amusing as they seem right now. 

This made me think about the idea that the web is 'small-town-izing' the world: that in a small town (and potentially in a highly web-enabled world) everyone knows everyone's embarrassing youthful (or otherwise) exploits, but you all just live with it and go about your business anyway. I mean, what else can you do? 

And, not to present questions without suggestions for answers, the article also presents some thoughts about policies and tools that probably won't help to protect privacy on social networking sites (anything that makes it harder to connect with other users, since that's what people are there to do), as well as some that might (education of users, as well as policies implemented by the sites).

There's a lot more in the article, but I've already rambled on long enough. In any case, I'm not really doing it justice, but do recommend it as an interesting look at an interesting piece of the web.

Facing the Web

Not to just be constantly obsessing over Facebook---I'm aware there are other fine technologies out there---but I found a couple of quite interesting articles that made me think about it again.

One, from the Boston Phoenix, addresses Facebook phobia, which the article defines not so much as the fear of Facebook as a site, but as the sense of social uneasiness one feels when one's every published mood swing and activity ("Jane is weeping and drinking wine") is broadcast to every person on one's social network. 

The piece talks about the pressure to select just the right titles for the favorite movies, music and TV shows sections, the nerve-wrackingly public nature of changing your relationship status, and the general anxiety of feeling that people you know from all kinds of places (work, high school, family) can see and perhaps judge your profile.

I can see what the article is saying, and have only my own experiences to go on by way of argument, but I have to wonder if most people really take Facebook profiles so seriously. I mean, yeah, I think about what I put on there, but I don't assume other people are studying it in any kind of depth, nor do I carefully pore over my friends' profiles for clues to anything in particular. 

Future research studies may reveal more!

The second piece, from Slate, is called How to take a Web head shot, and has relevance beyond the merely Facebookian, since as the article notes, it seems a lot of things (Gmail, Apple for iChat, blogs, social networking communities) want your picture these days.

The article discusses the challenges of finding the right picture, some popular picture types (with a link to a fun Guardian article detailing nine common styles for byline photos), and some common responses to the demand for photos (some pick a photo and use it everywhere, some carelessly post hundreds of photos, some refuse to include an image at all).

Remember for a moment how much attention people used to lavish on the perfect quote for their e-mail signature. Now that self-conscious energy is applied to a photo.

I do vaguely remember the era of carefully-chosen email signature quotes, and can sympathize with the pressure of trying to find just the right one, something that expresses something key about oneself, but will also append nicely to messages from "wanna go out later for beer?" to "I'm delighted to announce my engagement to the love of my life" to "I'm saddened to announce that my father was just brutally murdered by me." 

The whole problem was too much for me, and I personally have never used a signature quote. I've been known to express various things via photos, I suppose, from the careless, frequently-changed one, to set-it-and-forget-it, to the artistically blurry and unrecognizable, depending on the context.

There's a definite feeling of revealing something significant when you put a photo on a public space, and I was leery of it for quite some time (and still am in some contexts). One notes the large number of blogs that have a (presumably) real name attached, but no picture. Keeping the headshot off the page seems like a way to keep a modicum of distance between the writer and the vast, adoring public (howdy public!). 

On the other hand, putting the picture right up there might be seen as a way to more publicly claim and own your words: "that's right, here I am, and I said this; what of it?" 

Me, I'm constantly looking to disown everything I ever muttered. Politics, you know.

Just Another Pretty Facebook

I've found Facebook moderately helpful as a sort of medium-level social interface: I don't use it for many heart-to-heart conversations, but it helps me keep in casual contact with people I would otherwise not be in contact with much at all.

This was particularly interesting to me as a distance student while I was working on my degree, since I was able to add as friends some of the people in my classes in different parts of the country. We could then do the internet equivalent of waving hello to each other in passing, occasionally stopping to chat. 

It's not that we're becoming bosom pals through social networking sites, but we're acquainted. 

I'm now finding that helpful in another situation as I prepare to leave one job for another. I know a lot of people in my current job, and one always says "we'll keep in touch," but everyone knows that most of the time you don't.

Now we can link up on Facebook before I go, and we'll automatically keep in touch, at least a little. And being a little bit in touch may make it easier to send a quick note and ask if someone wants to have lunch, or whatever.

It will be interesting to see if that will make for a different experience leaving this job, than the last one I left, when all we had was email. 

Casting My Social Network

Finally! My membership in Facebook and LinkedIn pays off!

I enjoyed the PubMed application in Facebook, and was pleased to reply to the MLA event (I think I'm going to be there). I need to harass some more people to join me on LinkedIn, too. 

I can see these sites being useful as a way for librarians to keep in touch: as a student in an online program, Facebook has been a nice way to maintain contact with some of my classmates in other states.

I find the library profiles on Facebook and MySpace interesting as well, and this seems like a good way to offer a library presence in a place where users are likely to be. Whether or not they see it/take advantage of it may vary depending on the audience and the design of the profile, but it can't hurt to be there. Meet the people where they are, as they say.