Social Networking and Privacy

Social networking- it’s the fad of our generation. It’s what keeps us updated, connected, and in loop with our friends, family, and acquaintances. I find myself on facebook a lot. It’s hard to not move my mouse up to my bookmarks bar on safari and click on the little button that says “facebook.” It’s almost like an addiction. It passes the time, keeps me entertained, and gives me a feeling of connectedness to all my friends, and the rest of my community. Recently I’ve been too busy to spend a lot of time on facebook, but when I’m bored I do find myself spending a lot of time on facebook. Also, I find myself checking facebook via the internet on my blackberry to see status updates and see if I have any new notifications. It’s usually when I have a few moments of boredom waiting in line in benson, or after a boring long class, but it’s sometimes nice to still be connected to facebook even when I don’t have the time to sit down and log into my computer. It makes me realize though how multi connected we all are to facebook, whether its from the internet on your phone, to a text message alerting you of a notification, or an e-mail saying someone posted something on your wall; there are so many ways to stay informed by facebook that its totally engrained in our lives. One social network site I will never get involved with is FourSquare. I think it’s super weird and unnecessary to “check-in” to sites to alert your friends and get points. People don’t need to know that you were just at “McDonalds” or just checked-in to a local shopping mall. Who really cares. It’s so insignificant. There are much more interesting things to pay attention to and get updated on than where your friends or people you barely know are. I think programs like FourSquare and now the Facebook places are just inflating peoples egos that people actually care where they are or where they’ve been. I would be more likely to follow an interesting Twitter feed (which probably won’t happen), than play into the FourSquare or Facebook places fad. 

I’m not a huge user of Facebook status updates. I know there are a lot of people who update their facebook status’s, telling people where they are going or what they are doing, but I don’t think your entire Facebook circle needs to know stupid things like “[insert name here] is watching TV.” Don’t get me wrong, I like that people can have status’s on Facebook; a lot of the time they are funny or interesting and keep me updated on peoples lives. But it bugs me when people put unnecessary and stupid status’s up. Like expressing super deep emotions or constantly telling every detail of their life to the point where their entire Wall is just status updates. I personally think status updates should be saved for fun things, or interesting big events going on in your life. I still would much prefer to text or bbm my friends, and I spend a lot of time texting. I’m practically attached to my phone. I think it’s just become part of our culture though that our generation is so glued to our cellphones that we also expect instant responses from friends, and get offended when people have read our bbms but haven’t responded. (I know I do). I definitely do think that our culture is moving towards constant access and social networking as a main form of communication. I think overall though it has had a positive effect on society because I honestly can’t imagine my life without texting, and the different forms of social networking. I think it’s really opened a lot of doors to how we communicate and stay in touch with people. Without social networking I think we would lose a lot of communication and connection with people that we want to stay in the loop with, but otherwise would find hard to. There are some drawbacks though. Our lives have become so intertwined with technology that when we don’t have technology we freak out. If the internet doesn’t work, we get stressed out. If our phone breaks, we worry about who might be trying to get ahold of us. If we don’t have access to a computer, we feel helpless. Technology has a lot of benefits but it’s definitely spoiling us in the sense that without it we don’t know what to do. Technology is awesome, but I think everyone needs to make sure they have found a balance between too much exposure and reliance on technology, and making sure they utilize some of its benefits. 

Despite all the technology, social networks sites, and the internet I don’t really think about my privacy too much. I make sure my Facebook settings only allow my friends to access my information and pictures, but aside from that I don’t agonize over whose looking at my profile or tracking my online usage. I have nothing to hide, and nothing to be ashamed about. What some tech nerd in Washington D.C. might be doing with my internet history doesn’t bother me right now at least because who really cares what I google search or who I facebook creep on as long as I’m not doing anything illegal. I do think though that the thought of the technological footprint we will accumulate by the time we die is kind of creepy. I bet by the time we’re about to die, there would be some way to track down every single internet search we’ve done, phone call we’ve made, credit card purchase, and track where we’ve been for our entire lives. I think as technology right now is still in it’s early years relatively speaking, privacy is something we should be thinking about for the future, but not freaking out about right now (to some degree).