What Happens on the Internet, Stays on the Internet

Can, and should, this information be considered by future employers?

The proposition “what happens on the internet stays on the internet” is as absurd as its sporting and travel equivalents. I can see no basis to prevent future employers from obtaining whatever information they can readily and legally access on prospective employees. When people apply for jobs, they submit their CV’s which includes their previous jobs, publications, referees etc. Recruiters are permitted to consult these, and they recognize that such references will always be selected to cast a positive light on the applicant. There is no justification to stop employers looking for an independent or more balanced view, but what those applicants also have a right to expect is that the employers will keep what they find in context, and will only consider material that is relevant to the job. The trouble is, a rejected applicant will never know for sure that it was their online reputation which cost them a job or an interview.

An applicant aware that he or she has an unfavourable digital shadow would be well advised to counter it with a favourable Personal Web Presence as Tama has taught, and to possibly admit it up front in the job application, to prevent the “eureka!” moment. Even employers were young and immature once, and should be prepared discount history which is irrelevant to the job and to the applicant’s present situation. As Dana Boyd puts it: “Many of today's teens will also look back at the immaturity of their teen years and giggle uncomfortably. Over time, foolish digital pasts will simply become part of the cultural fabric.” However, where the unfavourable digital shadow is pertinent to (for example) a job’s requirements, then the applicant will have to live with it, and will learn Tama’s mantra to jealously guard your online reputation.

boyd states that "my generation isn't as afraid of public opinion as his was. We face it head-on and know how to manage it. We digitally document every love story and teen drama imaginable and then go on to put out content that creates a really nuanced public persona." Do you agree? Is boyd overemphasising the extent to which young people can design their online image?

Boyd is probably right to assert that “her generation” is less concerned about public opinion, but that is possibly because they are not aware how public are the details they have shared with their friends, and how they can count against you in the not too distant future. I reckon that young people can theoretically craft their online image to an incredible degree – they just need to make the determination to do it and have their wits about them from a very early age. I suspect this is not often the case!

Digital Shadow - Boyd's Trainwreck

danah boyd's article raises a number of interesting points regarding our perceptions of privacy and the arrangement of personal information online. This is a timely reading, as those of you with facebook will have noticed that the 'news feed' feature has been changed yet again. As always, a few questions to start us off:

- Inadvertent exposure: boyd addresses how personal relationships are transformed into quantifiable data online. How do you feel when your daily interactions, likes and dislikes are presented back to you as a public 'news feed' or list of actions?

I would not appreciate this at all, but then again, I don’t let it happen. Everything I read about Facebook makes me glad I have little involvement with it. Why would anyone post on Facebook everything they do when they know that it will be broadcast to everyone they know? Surely, to do so is the height of naivety and immaturity. Peer pressure must be the explanation.

- For those of you who use facebook, have you felt exposed as a result of the changes in format? Do you think twice, knowing that performing an action will produce data that is visible to all of your 'Friends'?

Not applicable to me, but I wonder what drivers are behind the “changes in format”. Is it (as we discussed in a previous module) commercial motivations driving Facebook’s quest for information about everyone? (Sounds unlikely, because it doesn’t add to Facebook’s database.) Are users actually asking for this facility? (I doubt it.) Are the ongoing changes part of experiments by Facebook to make the site more attractive to its impressionable customers, thus enabling it to grow? (I suspect so.)

- Information invasion: boyd comments that "the stream of social information gives people a fake sense of intimacy with others that they do not really know that well. If this is true, it could be emotionally devastating" (p17). Does the constant updating of your facebook Friends make you feel closer to them? Is this an asymmetrical relationship? Is it so different from 'following' a celebrity on Twitter?

Again, I can’t comment from personal experience. Facebook must be an interesting “topic” to study in that it produces such questions. I can only respond with another question: what motivates people to post anything on Facebook at all? It just seems to me that there is some pressure amongst Facebook devotees to report their every action, as if not to do so implies some sort of defect or failure. Twitterers seem to have the same behaviour. I joined Twitter as part of this Unit, but I find that most tweets, including my own, are most banal.

- - boyd argues that "infinite social information" can be ultimately destructive. Do you agree?
Infinite anything will probably destroy anything, but in this case, destructive of what? I think it’s Boyd who says that she receives so much information that it causes her to read none of it. In such a case, it is “overwhelming” and a waste of bandwidth. I suspect the biggest risk of destruction is to an individual’s time management and maybe self esteem?

Bloggy Activities

The early days of blogging were extremely optimistic about the potential of blogs to give everyone who wanted one a voice and a venue to publish. Now that blogging is over a decade old, to what extent have these early predictions come true?

The predictions of that statement have certainly come true, at least to the extent of people with access to the internet. Only the most basic of computer skills are required to set up a blog, and these could be acquired by talking to the staff at your local library if you're nervous.

The Baghdad Blog of Salam Pax is evidence of this proposition, and the fact that he managed to convey a credible inside story to the world in a way that international media could not is a delightful irony. Also ironic is that he never intended it for this purpose at all, but was just trying to communicate with a lost friend!

The writings of Blood (2000) and Rettberg (2008) have been highly interesting but also somewhat disconcerting. Interesting, because they took me to places I would not otherwise have gone, and they explained many of the blog phenomena of Web 2.0, categorising them most effectively. Their historical perspective is most illuminating, and helps explain why things are the way they are today. For example, Blood notes that in 1999, Blogger, with its ready facility to respond with comments and to link into other bloggers, turned blogs from ... into a very frequently updated short-form journal on matters of personal importance. Moreover, the style transformed from possible editorial to conversational.

Also fascinating is Blood's discovery that, through her blogging, she discovered what she was really interested in, and that it wasn't what she had previously thought. I think that this arises from the therapy of writing for pleasure, and is something shared through the ages by journal-keepers and diarisers of their lives. The difference with a blog is that all the world can see it, and this no doubt has appeal due to people's hard-wired desire for recognition and a degree of celebrity. The very existance of plazes.com, which can track users geographically, is evidence that many people want their privacy invaded.

Rettberg's discussion of Granovetter's theory of weak ties highlights one area where Web 2.0, through some of its exponents, may be actually failing the dreams of Berners-Lee and other web forefathers. Sites which encourage closed clubs (Rettberg's examples are Facebook and MySpace) actually tend to stifle creativity and innovation by excluding new blood which are necessary to provide it.

Rettberg talks about blogs facilitating ‘distributed conversations’ and even ‘distributed communities’; what do you understand these terms to mean?

When Rettberg mentions distributed conversations, she is arguing that, in blogging, no one person, organisation or authority is leading the conversation, as for example happens with traditional media. Instead, the internet, with no central hub, is a distributed network, and bloggers on that network can communicate without needing reference (or permission) from the central body.

The term distributed communities arises from the argument that blogging is not really conversing because the listener is not (necessarily) present when the speaker is speaking, so to speak. But Rettberg quotes blogger Danah Boyd (who has an affectation causing her to decapitalise her initials) that blogs have the advantage of persistance over conversation. Thus advantaged, blogs can maintain their perceived importance in social networking, even if the word 'conversations' has to be struck out.

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Blood, R (2000). weblogs: a history and perspective. Retrieved September 21, 2009 from http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html

Rettberg, J., (2008), Blogs, Communities and Networks in Blogging. Polity Press; Cambridge.