Week Ten Wheeeeeeeee~

Going to fill the rest of this out later today, but here's a quick thought on this week's subject: The reason I'm annoyed with Facebook deceptively recording and selling my demographic information isn't because I particularly mind corporations having all my data - though I understand why people would - but because they're effectively making money off of me without informing me or giving me a chance to profit as well, which annoys me for some reason. I also recognize that I may end up hurting my chances at getting a job if a potential employer Googles/Facebooks me, but I'm naive enough to think that if a prospective employer doesn't want to hire me based on the beer helmet I was wearing in that one photo (which isn't likely because I don't drink, but I'm speaking generally here) then I'm better off not working for them. I recognize that few people would be comforted by that fact in this economy but, well, we're supposed to be dogmatic for this assignment, right?

So, let's get to the assignment proper. Let's see, I don't think I've actually Googled myself before. Aaand...Weird, the first thing to come up is my Twitter account. I almost never use that, though. Next is the twitter account of my much cooler and more popular friend, who weirdly doesn't mention me at all. Why would that come up? Aaaand...the rest of it is my involvement on the campus Geek Club's FaceBook page. Ooh, and there's my FictionPress account that I haven't touched for ages because I'm too busy pursuing my Creative Writing degree to write anymore! Nothing really here I don't mind anyone knowing, though I'm not terribly active on the internet under my own name. In fact, let's check up the screenname I usually use. And...Nope. Nada relating to me. An advantage to using a Dungeons and Dragons in-joke as your alias.

So, I'm reading through some of the literature provided, the Google page with the little slideshow about Debbie getting in trouble because the ten year old children she taught, who friended her on FaceBook, could see the photos posted / was tagged in / commented on / otherwise was socially connected with concerning her wild party life. There's a whole lot of analysis out there about what this means, and Google and a bunch of other companies (according to the comments) are planning on working around this kind of "problem" by allowing people to separate their online lives into groups like they can their offline lives. The problem I have with this, that I've never seen anyone really examine, is that the problem with the above situation isn't that the social networking site Debbie used wasn't too transparent, but because our culture still has a lot of unnecessary baggage surrounding sexuality, and personal accountability, and...well, a staggering amount of things, actually. This may sound weird, but the problem isn't that Debbie's little students can find out that she likes watching half-naked men dancing around on tables during the weekend, but that's still thought of as a problem. Deception is such a cornerstone to human society (and, I think, is becoming more and more so, with growing complexity allowing growing corruption) that when something arises that could help us abandon it, we immediately and reflexively recoil from it. Is it too idealist to think that maybe the forced connection that the current model of social media engenders could be a good thing, forcing humanity to abandon old prejudices and grow closer as a whole? Probably, but I still like the way that sounds.

This is a little short, but that's really all I have to say on the subject. I know a Commu-fascist super-liberal like me should be more worried about corporations getting their hand on my data, but in the long run I think abandoning our old notions of privacy will be for the best.