The Innocence of Social Networking
13th January 2011
Innocence, like childhood is fleeting. Before long it’s gone and the big wide world gradually opens up to you, grinding you down and letting cynicism set in.
You become an adult.
Social networking is still a child, but not for long. As time marches on it is quickly becoming an adult, a tool that like a stranger, should not be accepted at face value.
The problem is of coarse that it’s still young, innocent and cuddly. We get to see friends more often, rediscover friends of old who we’d lost contact with pre-social networking, or we make new friends that give us an overwhelming sense of being a part of something. It’s also a soapbox for us to reveal ourselves, or to take part in global commentary on all matter of subjects. And mostly, it’s fun.
We fill in profiles with every last detail about lives, post pictures, movies and on facebook we ‘check-in’, so everyone knows where we are and where we’ve been. There’s not much that people won’t share.
This is where the child meets the big bad world and innocence becomes a dangerous trait.
When the telephone was invented, it became an extension of one of the earliest forms of social networking – the letter. But like the letter which could be intercepted and read without the recipient’s knowledge, the telephone soon became tapped. There’s no better example of this than Watergate and of late, the Daily Mirror’s tapping of the Royal Family.
Social networking sites are now the new target. It’s becoming exposed to the big bad world. Some governments are trawling facebook and looking at our friends. They can quickly tell if we have ‘extreme’ views. This is particularly pertinent in China and Iran. In such places being gay could label you ‘extreme’ and thus a threat! Leave you to face the harshest of consequences.
Interestingly it has been reported that such countries take the view that it takes as little as eight ‘friend connections’ for them to determine what kind of person you are.
The US government are now openly in on the act and want Twitter to handover information that could lead to the Wikileaks whistleblower and we are just beginning to see authorities in Europe as well as the US consider prosecuting tweets deemed to be libelous.
Slightly less severe, we in the communications industry also take part in analyzing social networks for a competitive advantage, though it would be fair to say that we act rather more ethically and are governed by rules. However in the same breath . . . it would be naive to assume that all quarters of the communications industry act so responsibly.
The reality is that Social media is a child that needs to be taught to be more considered in it’s willingness to reveal all. Or rather, we the user needs to stop acting the child. After all, we don’t advertise when we leave our homes and leave a key under the doormat. So the same should be applied to social networking.
