The Unintended Consequences of Social Networking

What is Social Networking?
We define social network sites as web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html

Comparison to blogs, etc.
Social Networking sites are self-contained
People who love Facebook tend to stay in Facebook and link to others within the site
Difficult to link out
Blogs, Twitter part of online social network
The primary purpose is not to connect with people
Expression

Rise of social network sites

Individual unintended consequences
The Bad
Blurring the line between personal and professional lives
The TMI factor--finding out more than you want to know about colleagues
Losing job opportunities because of the drunken picture you posted
Being stalked, harrassed, etc.
The Good
Blurring the line between personal and professional lives
Finding out new and interesting things about colleagues
Keeping up with far flung colleagues
Employment and other opportunities

Societal Unintended Consequences
Commercialization
Privacy and security concerns
Manipulation through the network
Mediating relationships and businesses through proprietary applications
Changing social fabric
Ownership of identities and identity-related data

Clueless
Teenagers are learning how to use social networks by interacting with their friends, rather than learning these behaviors from their parents or teachers. . . . Often parents have no clue about the information teens are publicly revealing (Sullivan, 2005).

It's always been about "monetizing"
Last September, Rupert Murdoch purchased MySpace from Intermix for a reported $580 million cash buyout. Currently, “Murdoch is getting: a gold mine of market research, a microscope into the content habits and brand choices of America’s capricious youth market — not to mention millions of potential new customers for News Corp.’s Fox subsidiaries.” [ 10 ]. . . . The commercial aspect of the site is quite apparent. Marketers who target teen consumers can use stated, personal information gathered from social networking sites for purposes other than what users intend.

The Government wants that info, too
In post 9/11 America, government agencies appear to be doing the opposite [of protecting privacy]. In 2005, the Department of Defense proposed to create a marketing and recruitment database to track students for military recruitment. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (2005), “Among the information kept on students were ethnicity, phone numbers, e–mail addresses, intended fields of study and extracurricular activities. The record system even included parents’ attitudes about military recruitment.” [ 16 ] But, the system was set up before notifying the public, a violation of the Privacy Act.

But that information can be used for good
We have vast amounts of data that can be reapplied to investigate fundamental questions about social organization and about morality and other concerns that have perplexed us forever.

Social Graph of Facebook connections

The Unintended Consequences of Social Networking

by Laura Blankenship on Jul 29, 2009

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