Friday, August 10, 2007

Express Yourself

Never before have I had such a candid view of people in my life. I have current friends, old school friends, work colleagues...all in view of each other via Facebook. I realise there are some privacy settings which I have tweaked, but right now there is a fine line between friends and work in this communication medium. Are we becoming a more tolerant and candid society? Is it Facebook Faux Pas to hide your "wall" or friends? Is being a "private person" less acceptable than ever?

Another question - is Facebook really about connecting or is it about embedding your identity? Do you get to know more about your friends or yourself by using FB and twitter? How much of this is manufactured identity? Will "who's hot and who's not" become a determining factor in collaboration on projects? I can't help but think that although we try (I hope) to be genuine in updating our profiles, sometimes there is a certain pop-culture spin element involved.

Third question. Will companies begin to lose the power of proprietary communication channels such as intranets and email/meeting management tools? We are beginning to see more use of del.icio.us for sharing bookmarks, FB to share events (I love being able to invite friends to events via FB and having a view of who is coming, who is not and not being limited to only work colleagues), twitter to share hot URLs , secondlife meetings with impromptu external parties invited. Will companies embrace this 24 x 7 global water cooler or will they shut the doors as they struggle to manage IP?

4 comments:

Jasmin Tragas said...

oh yay just found this great clip about social network visibility

the vampire's dream said...

hello wonderwebby,

what an awesome link you posted... the video is amazing... i was even drawn into watching the rest of them.

your original post is also fascinating... i wonder if facebook and other social sites like twitter etc are like glass houses... people who live in them would start off being very conscious that others can watch - but after a while, there would be lapses in concentration and the façade would come undone... i'm thinking it would not be possible to be fake all the time...

The other side of the coin is that you become what you keep acting out... so if someone was after only "branded" friends and wanted the "coolest" things on their page... it would be a shallow existence, but that would in essence become them...

Not saying that everyone will be putting up a fake persona on those sites... but i guess there would be an element of that in most people's updates...

At the very least, caution would be exercised on what is being broadcasted... well, you'd think so anyway... although i'm very unsure if it is... i know too many people that post just about everything on the their public pages... the issue with that i find is that sometimes, i might be included in their updates... so now there is information about me on the net - personal stuff (or at least, personal to me) that i don't want broadcasted... A solution to that might be polluting the namespace... aka, creating a lot of fake stuff - unrelated and "spam" esentially with my real name in order to confuse any searcher...

hmm... big opportunity in creating a namespace corruption business... too easy for others to abuse though... kind of like creating a nuclear missile... great fun if you are a nuclear physicist - but you can't ignore the consequences... perhaps building a nuclear power station would be better :-)

Jasmin Tragas said...

yes aren't they great!

I don't mean to imply that everyone is fake, but there is a whole lot of identity creation going on. There is also the chance of something updated in FB with sincerest intention, being misinterpreted as contrived or pretentious. Or just plain misunderstood. On the plus side I get to know much more about friends, colleagues and realise I have more in common with some than I knew.
You will like this article on Facebook being a bit big brother-ish
Hmm namespace corruption, had not thought of that before! Imagine!

the vampire's dream said...

hey ww,

did you see the code for the front page of facebook: it's at: http://facebooksecrets.blogspot.com/2007/08/facebook-home-page-code.html

wow... just goes to show... quick and dirty sometimes work... i haven't seen code that bad since my first year at uni... :-)