One of the biggest issues that stood out to me after the week 4 lectures on Virtual Communities & Social Networks was that of trust. One of our seminar questions from Erika was “Do you trust virtual associates differently to f2f associates?” – and I don’t know about the rest of you but my answer was a definite ‘yes’! It’s not so much of your parents’ idea that everybody you meet on the internet MUST be untrustworthy and weird, but just that you often don’t feel as comfortable with someone you haven’t encountered in the physical world. When you read a statement in text on the internet there isn’t that way of telling if it is false or not, like the way you could tell from the facial expressions or bodily signs from a person you are having a face to face conversation with. I have found in the past that there have been people I have talked to only online for several years and on some level consider a friend, however regardless of the kind of details I have already shared with these people I am still kind of hesitant to reveal to them high risk information such as my address.
One other thing that I thought about was the fact that can we trust the people who have made the website or chatroom our virtual community is forming within? A lot of the time we don’t know who is behind the website, what kind of information they store, or whether or not they are sitting silently in the background reading the conversations we are having within that network. The New Zealand Herald published an article last year claiming that some of the people that run the Facebook social networking site have links with the CIA. The article notes the interesting paragraph in Facebook’s privacy policy that states “Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service (eg. photo tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalised experience. By using Facebook, you are consenting to have your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States.” Now how on earth would collecting information about me from newspapers and blogs help me to have a better Facebook experience?!? The other alarming thing the article pointed out to me was the term that when you upload any content to Facebook “you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license to use, copy, perform, display, reformat, translate, excerpt and distribute such information and content and to prepare derivative works of, or incorpoate into other works, such information and content, and to grant and authorise sublicenses of the foregoing.” So when you upload photos from your drinks on the weekend you are apparently giving Facebook a license to reformat and display this and also incorporate it into other works. A friend of mine was trying to delete her profile from Facebook the other weekend, and while watching her try it just seemed that Facebook was extremely reluctant to get rid of the information it has collected.
Even though Facebook would be the only means of keeping in contact with some people I know, it just seems to be one website that won’t be getting any trust from me.
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I do agree with your idea on personal experience. I think that our generation were some of the first to use email and the internet and so there were so many threats that we had to look out for so we were always very weary of the internet.
I also found that because our generation had always grown up meeting people face to face, it was kind of hard to meet people on the internet without seeing their face. Whereas with the generation today they are more used to meeting people on the internet.
I like your idea of the facebook aswell!! Its the exact same as emailing like using hotmail and sending texts of our phones. There are government groups that read them without our permision because its a matter of national security, I guess if you want to know where I went out saturday night that it is a matter of national security you can please yourself!??? :/
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