Social Networking and Privacy
Your task for this assignment is to record your thoughts on the prevalence of social networking. How often do you use social networking sites/tools like Facebook, Twitter, or FourSquare? How much time to do you spend texting, tweeting, or checking status updates on your phone or computer?
Do you think the cultural move toward social networking, constant access, and the loss of privacy it sometimes brings about is a positive/negative trend on the whole? What are some of the benefits and drawbacks of this entanglement between our personal lives and technology? Have you ever "over-shared" or texted, tweeted, or posted something you have regretted? Do you ever worry about your privacy when it comes to using these tools?
My life is extremely dependant on technology. And it seems now that everything is dependant the internet. My social life is occuring I would say at least 25% of the time online whether it be emailing or facebook. My homework is primarily online, and like this class, I am now supposed to read assignments through downloaded documents from the computer and have online discussions with my classemates. Not to mention my passion for Graphic Design and my current job is almost entirely computer based. Whether it be to create a logo, poster or handouts, I do most of that primarily on the computer. In terms of communicating with my boss we have a continuous chain of emails. I only occasionally talk to my friends from home on the phone now. Now, it seems that it is a lot easier to type a long facebook message and send to all my friends from home at once, rather than calling them individually. I would say that technology, in terms of social networking is time efficient. It allows me to stay in touch with people while I am doing other things, BUT technology can be deceiving in that I can get caught up in something on the internet then I lose track of time.
To further discuss this idea of time, I think that we have a win/lose situation with technology. We gain the valuable time of keeping in touch with people on a larger and more efficient scale (facebook, gmail, texting, calling), but we lose the valuable face to face time needed for social interaction to create relationships and connection. As we progress further into technological advances I feel like we will continue to create a social rift and monopoly. Only people who can afford the new inventions will have greater access to social contact through the internet while people who are not as fortunate are stuck with "old" technologies and ways to communicate. There will be this social hierarchy being created online. People with wireless will easily have more access to communicate faster with one another than people that don't. And with constant access, like the fear of video games, I feel that we might lose our desire to go outside and be active and communicate outside computer borders. If everything is accessible to us online, including our friends, how can we interact with one another off of the computer? There is already this decrease of social interaction in social places. Rarely do I see many people at the park anymore or even at the movie theaters, because everything has become available through technology. Heck even now, my friend prefers to do wii fit then go to the gym with me. She thinks one, she won't have to change out of her pj's and two, people won't see her get all sweaty. I think the gym is a great thing to go to with friends and to see people you haven't seen in awhile. Therefore i think she's missing out, even if people see me sweat, that doesn't bother me. With that said though, I still think there is this positive trend with the internet, because there is this idea of a global community and everyone being able to communicate with one another. I am hoping though, that with a global community, we gain this understanding and respect for others' cultures and can balance online and offline social interaction.
Lastly, I would find the internet to most definitely not be a place to share your deepest thoughts and secrets, however it can be easily forgotten that what we write on the internet, is permanent. It is not like words that come from our mouth, because it is written and then embedded into the internet. It is traceable. I know that I have written things that probably should not have been for everyone to see but my friends, but I think it becomes so easy to forget what we do say can effect ourselves and others. And another thing, privacy is an issue. The internet is a place too, where false statements and lies do occur and become almost blown up for everyone to see your private information. What's hard is that you do want to share some of your information to people, but then it's hard to control who else sees it. Like facebook for example. I know that there are some things that I should not share, but facebook does not have a privacy setting for that. So then, I ask myself why I even have a facebook if I don't want people to know certain things about me. Well, I think in the end, the positive things I have gained from social interaction online outweigh the negative things... at least for now.
