A company supplies a service to the marketplace. However, some people through using the company’s product are getting severely reprimanded at their jobs and in the worst cases are being sacked.
Moreover your hedonistic use of this company’s service for now may pass without comment, particularly if you are studying with no formal censure other than your like-minded (hedonistic) users, but later on it could severely hamper your career.
Well, hello, there is just such a company and it’s called Facebook and it has 200 million users.
For example: that online picture of you protesting outside the Chinese embassy at a Free Tibet demonstration could sink you applying for a job 15 years down the line at an international law/engineering/architect firm with business in Asia. (Tibet will never be free and this company’s service never forgets). And as for a joke photo of your pretending (!) to smoke P or a crack pipe - you had better start practising saying, ”Would you like to supersize that sir,” with a smile on your face.
The stories of people getting pinged because of what they wrote on their public pages are legion. And the message hammered home is, ‘Keep your Facebook profiles private’.
But what happens when your ‘friends’ dob you in for what you wrote?
It is happening. In real life some of your so-called ‘friends’ give you grief; that’s why they end up known as former friends. So why anyone would think that online friends would be any more loyal is a bit of a mystery to me.
Facebook has been of the top shining international success stories of Web 2.0, but unlike the other success stories (YouTube, etc.), it’s got a bit of a dodgy past as covered in the New Yorker. You will need to scroll through to page 7 of the article to get to this little gem:
”In a lawsuit filed in a Massachusetts federal court in September, 2004, the three founders of HarvardConnection, which is now called ConnectU, allege that Zuckerberg stole their idea and connived to delay the site’s launch so that he could complete Facebook first. Zuckerberg denies any wrongdoing, and in November, 2004, Facebook filed a countersuit, charging ConnectU with defamation. The case could go to trial next year.
”Both sides agree on some facts, including that in November, 2003, Zuckerberg agreed to work on ConnectU. He says that the programming he was asked to do was more complicated than he had expected, and that he got caught up in academic work. ConnectU’s founders, the Winklevoss brothers and Divya Narendra, claim that Zuckerberg deliberately procrastinated. To support their case, they showed me a series of e-mails that they have filed with the court.”
The case was subsequently settled out of court, with the standard confidentiality agreements between both parties.
At the US-based Edjurist website school teachers are strongly advised not to use Facebook.
”If you use Facebook in a non-professional manner, just be prepared to be fired for it. Students, parents and administrators absolutely will check your page and that information will be used in employment action against you.”
And how long, if it has not already happened, before a person’s Facebook page is subpoenaed by the prosecution/defence in a legal case where the person’s character is a critical part of the prosecution/defence. Let’s say a charge of rape. Your innocent, but comments - even tongue in cheek comments - made years before about women in general after a bitter break-up could cause you a whole lot of grief.
So why are people signing up to Facebook, like there’s no tomorrow? This from the New Yorker article:
”The eagerness to parade in public on the Internet still surprises many people. Duncan Watts, a sociologist at Columbia who has been studying social networks for a decade, says that the growth of sites like Facebook and MySpace reflects a dramatic shift in how young people view the Internet. ”Now everyone is used to the idea that we are connected, and that’s not so interesting,” he told me. ”If I had to guess why sites like Facebook are so popular, I would say it doesn’t have anything to do with networking at all. It’s voyeurism and exhibitionism. People like to express themselves, and they are curious about other people.”
That was the smooth highway for Facebook back in May, 2006 when the article was published. These days, well there are some serious potholes in it. Because people are going to continue to stuff up on the website and land themselves in trouble.
The ”I lost my job because of Facebook” stories will continue to roll out because, at the heart of the matter, having a crap friend on Facebook is so much more damaging than a real life one.
