Facecrack
Sex, interested in, relationship status, birthday, political views, religious views....offered to you without even having to move your mouse. Its true Facebook provides ample room to share a mini biography with some 64 million users, but does nobody keep anything to themselves anymore? Scroll down and you can type for lengths about your personal interests, favourite pastimes and most listened to tunes. And by the time you read to the end of a profile you are an expert on what Johnny likes doing on the weekend, where he went to high-school, and whether or not he enjoys listening to Led Zeppelin. In a world inundated with web culture and social networking sites, is people’s privacy being threatened?
When Facebook was created only four brief years ago it was intended as a networking site only for students at Harvard University. It quickly grew to surrounding Ivy League schools and since September 2006 anyone over the age of 13 has been able to join. The craze behind the Facebook phenom shows no signs of slowing. New applications are added daily and constant upgrades serve to benefit the millions of user’s world wide. And with more and more user’s joining daily, the access to your seemingly personal information becomes absolute.
Granted you do have options to control who is allowed to see what on your profile, it begins to become hard to manage your contacts as friends or randoms. Sure, you know that guy who just added you from your English tutorial, but do you really want him to see pictures of you from you summer vacation with the family? And what about the girl you went to high school with but never really talked to. Is it necessary for her to have access to your latest educational endeavors? It becomes overwhelming to think about just exactly who has access to your info online.
So you decide to delete you account, boycott the whole site and move on with your now Facebook free life. Now what? You'll have to deal with not receiving a Facebook invite to your friend’s 19th b-day. You'll have to forever be behind in the latest in's and out's of people's relationships, because you know if it's on Facebook it has GOT to be true. And the worst being un-aware of the hideous photo's still circulating un-tagged of you at last night’s karaoke shin dig.
It's a lose-lose scenario. Either be aware of your publicly broadcasted life, or exist naive to the cult of Facebook that you will always be a part of....whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.
About Me
- Juls
- vancity/t-dot, Canada
- a lover of nature, the sea, the sky, animals, mountains, sustainability, tea, vintage clothing, thoughtful lyrics and all things green.
2 comments:
I hate facebook. Totally creeps me out that people have access to all this info about me. Thats why I went through my friends list and deleted everyone I don't know, made it so that everyone can only see my limited profile except ACTUAL friends, changed my last name to 'Tee' as facebook would not let me us 'T', and Im pretty sure its impossible to search me on facebook unless we're already friends. I thought about getting rid of my account but of course then would be completely out of the loop. Plus I like to know what pictures of me are on the internet for the world to see, its better than not knowing at all.
Interesting topic, Julie. I am totally amazed and sometimes appalled by what people put on Facebook (Way to much information, thank you). Thank Goodness it didn’t exist when I was a teenager/university student. It isn’t always a matter of determining who has access to your information. I have seen friends post pictures of their friends, or information about their friends which has been very embarrassing (pictures of them in various states of undress, or compromising positions, or with some other then who they started the evening with). At work I have seen it cause legal problems for people. As proof of breaching a court order, pictures posted on Facebook have been submitted as evidence. My opinion is that absolutely nothing posted on any sort of public networking site is private. There are way too many holes for info to leak and way too many ways for these sites to be hack into.
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