Facebook began life as a means for like-minded, socially connected individuals to communicate easily using the interwebtubenets. It has morphed into something beyond its origins and, as such, has significantly affected the way users are 'out there'. The EFF has an interesting summary of the changes that have occurred to Facebooks privacy settings and there is also a handy glossary of terms used by them here. The key one is 'Connections' which on its own looks innocuous enough until you actually sit back and think of the ramifications of having a 'Like" or 'Dislike' choice to make. Every day you make decisions. These decisions become part of your life and some minor ones have an effect that is far in excess of their original intent. Analysis of these choices made elsewhere can portray a very different view of an individual when taken out of context.
Recently, I sent an email to a friend who had Yahoo Updates switched on (this is done by Yahoo automatically). After the email had been sent I noted that the friend had given a "big thumbs up" to a story and the snippet of the story was "Man dies after car hits light pole". Taken out of context this looked bad. My friend being happy about someone dying in a car crash? Whoah. He did not realise that this was happening and immediately went and switched it off. In reality, the offending story was with regard to a road racer with a long history of offences who had lost control while driving at a ridiculous speed and the 'thumbs up' was for one less nutter on the roads. Nobody else was hurt in the crash apart from the light pole and a car with a significant number of "Hoon" modifications.
No comments:
Post a Comment