Lesson 25: Social Sites I

In this lesson, we return to issues broached earlier in the course concerning online behaviour, privacy and safety, setting these in the context of social software and networking and considering some of the implications about the value of online social networks and the pitfalls to watch out for.

First, we'll discuss your blogged work on Wikipedia.

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First, a video overview of social networking:


If there's time and you need a reminder of how social sites work in practice:



So Flickr allows us to do things like create Places …







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However, there are things to think about when it comes to sharing personal information online:



To understand this video you'll need to find out more about i) the AOL search data scandal and ii) the Facebook 2006 feeds controversy — danah boyd has a good post on this:

Facebook implemented a new feature called "News Feeds" that displays every action you take on the site to your friends. You see who added who, who commented where, who removed their relationship status, who joined what group, etc. This is on your front page when you login to Facebook. This upset many Facebook members who responded with outrage. Groups emerged out of protest. Students Against Facebook News Feeds is the largest with over 700,000 members. Facebook issued various press statements that nothing was going to change. On September 5, Mark Zuckerberg (the founder) told everyone to calm down. They didn't. On September 8, he apologized and offered privacy options as an olive branch. Zuckerberg invited everyone to join him live on the Free Flow of Information on the Internet group where hundreds of messages wizzed by in the hour making it hard to follow any thread; the goal was for Facebook to explain its decision. In short, they explained that this is to help people keep tabs on their friends but only their friends and all of this information is public anyhow.

So what are the issues we can think of that social networking might require us to think about? Privacy; digital identity; sense of self; narcissism; reputation; group behaviour; context; register; audience; mediated public spaces; vulnerability (sexual predators; bullies; advertisers) …  danah boyd's Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What? (pdf; 2007) this summarises very well her views on the following points (which you've heard in assemblies and elsewhere):

A lot of personal information is being exposed by huge numbers of people and this quickly results in a marked degree of ambient exposure in which many networked people are involved:

There has been a lot written about young people and the risks of openness, but the rest of us need education and potentially protection from this exposure. The benefits of ambient intimacy far outweigh the potential risks of exposure in my opinion, but awareness of this exposure is important. Education is probably the best way to help people manage exposure via content …  Ambient Exposure, Leisa Reichelt (2008)

Prep: find out more about the origins and controversies surrounding Facebook. You might start with this Wikipedia page.  What aspects of the site appeal to you and why? What concerns do you have? The links above will help you, and here are some others: Hey, Facebook, just let go of me, The Times (2008); Plea to ban employers trawling Facebook, The Times (2008); Identity 'at risk' on Facebook (BBC, 2008; explored further in Facebook Hacked Again); People You May Know (Facebook blog, 2008). Using these and any other links you find that are of value, write a set of discussion points on your weblog — for use at the start of the next lesson.