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?