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Some Thoughts on Social Networking
Dec. 10th, 2009 07:14 pmThere's been a lot of talk about the new privacy settings on facebook. Yes, it sucks that a lot of the defaults are to show things to everybody. But it's pretty easy to override that if you pay attention. And the choice about who to show individual posts to is a good thing.
I've always operated on the assumption that everything I say on-line anywhere other than a private email is going to be findable by somebody or other at some time in the future. Therefore, I don't write much about certain subjects and I try to be cautious what I say about others. That was not always the case in my earliest days on Usenet some 20+ years ago, alas. I like to think I've outgrown the need to be shocking.
Even then, we knew that the electronic village had a low barrier to entry and there was no way to keep the electronic village idiots out. The way one survives in a large city is to find smaller communities to live within. (I mean that for real life too. I have communities through work, through storytelling, etc. and I have little need to interact with the vast majority of the rest of the greater D.C. metropolitan region.) This is true for social networks also. You can group your friends on facebook (or on livejournal) or you can hang out on smaller, focused networking sites (e.g. flyertalk for the travel obsessed) and ignore most of the rest of the net.
My neighborhoods are comfortable places for me. Every now and then I find another community I like enough to pitch a virtual tent in. But I always remember that it's pretty easy to open the tent flaps.
I've always operated on the assumption that everything I say on-line anywhere other than a private email is going to be findable by somebody or other at some time in the future. Therefore, I don't write much about certain subjects and I try to be cautious what I say about others. That was not always the case in my earliest days on Usenet some 20+ years ago, alas. I like to think I've outgrown the need to be shocking.
Even then, we knew that the electronic village had a low barrier to entry and there was no way to keep the electronic village idiots out. The way one survives in a large city is to find smaller communities to live within. (I mean that for real life too. I have communities through work, through storytelling, etc. and I have little need to interact with the vast majority of the rest of the greater D.C. metropolitan region.) This is true for social networks also. You can group your friends on facebook (or on livejournal) or you can hang out on smaller, focused networking sites (e.g. flyertalk for the travel obsessed) and ignore most of the rest of the net.
My neighborhoods are comfortable places for me. Every now and then I find another community I like enough to pitch a virtual tent in. But I always remember that it's pretty easy to open the tent flaps.
