I recently removed a friend off my list of facebook friends simply because she had become a little too noisy and lousy for me. Hey!! Maybe it was a little extreme but.... I simply could not take it any longer. This is someone I've known since we were kids. I've always known she was very vocal but it appears that facebook has put a sonorus charm on her "noiseness" (for those of you who are not Harry Potter fans, sonorus is a magic spell that helps to amplify your voice greatly).
Is this good or bad?
For some circumstances, I guess it is very good if you are a public figure or a company. It will be very important to be seen and heard by your adoring fans or hateful enemies (whichever one you collect). But for an individual who loves to drop comments on a daily repertoire of his/her daily movements, it can simply be excruciatingly annoying. I don't want to know when he buys you flowers. I don't want to know how many times he called you last night. And I sure as hell don't care if he's your Rock and is by your side. Ok, maybe once or twice you can leave a note just to prove that you are being loved by some "he or her" who thinks the world of you but NOT EVERY 2 HOURS!!
The phenomenon of social networking has revolutionized the way we make friends and keep them. Everybody on facebook has a story on how they found some long lost friend from ages ago. I think that's great and the fact that you never have to get out of touch is fantastic. If you love to gloat about how successfull you've become, nice. It's good to know that your friends are doing well, and if you're not doing so well it can be inspiring.
But you shouldn't turn it into a chance to turn the front page of your fellow facebook friends into your hourly diary. I know we love to talk and despite the fact that we scream about privacy violations by the likes of Google, BT and Phorm, we all still love to display our world to the world.
When BT announced it will be piloting the use of Phorm's new revolutionary behavioural targeting advertising system, WebWise, we all could not stop screaming on how invasive it will be to our privacy. Even worse when it was discovered that BT had already run tests using Phorm's software on a number of their users without informing the users. BT and Phorm (formerly knows has 121 Media) took some very very bad press on the issue. If we are all so concerned about the possibility of our privacy being violated by big media companies then why do we still scream out all we try to cover on the likes of facebook and twitter? Are we all that hypocritical? Or would we simply will like to be able to control the information we put out there rather than have BT and Google do it for us?
I think softwares like Phorm's Webwise and Google's StreetWise are inevitable. We all love to think the internet is largely free; let me help you here.
THE INTERNET IS NOT FREE. You give up so much of your personal information to be able to use its so called free services. To get a simple mail box from google or yahoo, you tell them so much about yourself within 5 minutes of filling a form. An amount of information you will not give out even if you were on a date with the cutest guy or girl you've ever met; well at least not within 5 minutes anyway (depending on how loud you are as a person). What I'm trying to say is the fact that you are online reading this blog means that so much of you is already scattered on the internet. Either knowingly or unknowingly, you are screaming for attention on the internet, so complaining about privacy violation is simply poppycock.
Yes social networking has made us louder and perhaps lousier. Good or bad ? Up to you to decide. Is our privacy being violated by big media companies? I don't think so. We give them our info and we want them to serve us better. They need our info to do it. We just need to ensure that it's used properly and with the right amount of sensitivity.
For my friend who I took off my facebook list of friends, I love you very much but I need you to please stop with the 2 hourly updates; it is driving me up the wall!
