I recently had a conversation with someone about the value of Facebook as a company. The website itself is probably worth very little, the value however, lies in the sheer billions of data people eagerly and freely supply about themselves and their friends each day through posts, photos, and profile updates. Given that this was on my mind, I was excited to read a blog post by Mark Zuckberg, founder of the popular social networking site titled "Improving your ability to share and connect."
"Sharing information..." is that just a fancy way of them saying, please supply us with even more personal data that we can one day sell? Before I even read the blog entry, I decided to do a search for the word "private." It came up once in the first paragraph.
It's amazing what Facebook did in terms of connecting people, allowing them to share things for free and interact with friends in this online space. Once the focus shifted to "news feeds," I got worried. Why do we care so much about what someone is doing every second of the day? Or care to share that information ourselves? I personally think posting sonograms is crossing the line...
I worry about privacy and the volumes of data under the control of Mark Zuckberg, yet, like all other facebook users, I freely post my photos and check update status at least 10 times a day and tell people what I'm up to.
Today, it's all about connectivity. I'm not sure I would be as close with all my friends that have moved away over the years if it weren't for social networking. It's making the world a lot smaller and Facebook is leading the way through the mapping of these connections.
Will this data dumping and over sharing on social networking sites become detrimental to our society?
We've created a monster!
14 years ago
Everything is good for you in moderation. The same goes for social networking sites. Like you mentioned, it is a great way to stay in touch with friends and family that are far away. For me that is where the greatest value lies with these sites along with the ability to quickly, easily, and affordably communicate with many people, such as using a facebook status update or invite.
ReplyDeleteBut in excess I believe that data dumping is a bad thing. Detrimental to society? Maybe not, but in general, social networking sites have access to a plethora of data all ready and the key is how to harness this data into useful information. It seems like the focus is on getting more data from users as opposed to really analyzing and learning from relevant information which is already available. Sometimes more is less.
It's almost impossible to talk about the social media revolution without bringing up data, data mining and it's applications. This brings home the fact that the internet revolution is really just a subset of the computing revolution, which has been going on for longer and has made digital technology ubiquitous.
ReplyDeleteIn this case, the internet is acting as a gigantic data source for number-crunchers, who are experiencing a revolution of their own.
Ian Ayers' book, Supercrunchers, provides a great overview of this. his website is:
http://islandia.law.yale.edu/ayers/indexhome.htm
I agree that the value in terms of the data collected is priceless and the best part is that it continues to grow. There is something about the news feeds that is almost addictive. Nobody knows why there are doing it, but they simply can't stop. I think when Facebook added the news feed it was a way of keeping up with the competition and the other platforms out there. If you think about it Twitter is all news feeds and at first when Facebook added this feature along with changing their layout many members were outraged and didn't quite understand what was going on. Now that is all something of the past and we are all sucked in.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with Keith, that everything is good in moderation. However, I don't think that the data sharing will become a detriment, but almost something that is expected. We are part of a society that loves to be connected and loves the idea of being able to share the highs and lows in our life.
As much as I hate to admit, I know that when I post an update. I will check back to see if there was a comment and if someone liked what I said. I think this is definitely something that we feed on for survival.
I think that we are still learning how to use social media tools. Some people, (regrettably), still update their status many times a day and tell us that they are "doing laundry," "hittn' the gym," "sooooo hung over...." However, I notice that I see less of these kinds of updates. Maybe it is because I have blocked those people from my feed, but I also think we are getting used to the fact that no one cares that you just got back from the grocery store. So I think people are learning more about the tools and how we use them as well as how marketers use them. As time passes and this technology matures, I think the pendulum will swing and we will not have quite as much private information out there.
ReplyDelete