Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace, LinkedIn & You Tube, are all names that we have become accustomed to over the last 5 years. They have become part of the vernacular, and even though some grannies out there hate the idea of using Facebook or Twitter, they still know about it. You just cannot ignore this social phenomenon that is taking place in the world today.
The thing that strikes me about all this, is how transparent these sites are making us as a society. I know that this is a fairly broad and sweeping statement, but let me quantify it. A debate that raged early on in the office halls of Facebook, when they talked about opening up Facebook to everyone, was that you might have two profiles, one for your work colleagues and one for your friends, but Mark Zuckerberg was adamant that that could not happen.
Who you are, is who you are, and your Facebook profile should reflect that.
The thing that set Facebook apart in the early days, was that the site was built on the premis that you use your real name. Facebook was one of the first social networking sites to do so. Most times the way somebody would validate that it is indeed you, is by seeing who your friends are on Facebook. That would provide the necessary credibility that you are indeed who you say you are.
Now saying something in “anonymity” is one thing, people often become very bold and brazen and would possibly lash out more so, as nobody would know who they are – mob mentality. However, you would think that if people know who we are, we would be a little more timid or cautious with what we say on these social media platforms? Not so…
Case in point;
- Kevin Peterson on the English teams selection, has an outburst on Twitter. He gets slapped with a fine.
- Stephanie Rice hurls a homophobic slur on Twitter & loses a sponsorship deal with Jaguar.
- Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, makes tweets critising the referee. He gets slapped with a hefty fine.
- Arnold Schwarzenegger tweets a video link of himself welding a massive knife! Oops! Sorry!
It seems that users of these platforms have become so comfortable with this “social transparency” that they almost become oblivious to it, and it is not just the celebs who are making these social blunders. Vents or rants that would have been saved for the showers, the bar, and for close family & friends, are being openly broadcast to “friends” on these social media platforms without any thought of the consequences. Conversations between people can be followed at will. You do not even have to “spy” or “hunt” for the info, it is just lying out there in the open. There are numerous accounts of people losing their jobs over tweets, relationships ended / exposed and other worse consequences of thoughtless status updates, tweets, posts, etc.
So does this mean that this information is now less “valuable” or less “private” than it used to be?
Or it is no longer important?
Ultimately, our social connections to each other are surely still of massive importance, the info we exchange from one person to another. That is what makes us human, but then why is so much of it now being openly left out there for “all” to see?
We all know the world we live in is shrinking at a a rapid rate, but are our “Social Profiles” just characters that get played out daily on these platforms?
Or is it really you?
Or just a piece of you?
By being on these social platforms, we “try” to project a persona without even knowing it, we upload a profile picture that shows our “good side”, we try and come up with witty sayings, we borrow quotes from “learned” people to make us look intellectual. However, by the very nature of these social platforms, if we are not being “genuine” we will most likely be caught out over time. If not by our own actions but by the actions of one of our “friends”. I have heard, that at some of the college / high school parties, cellphones are banned in case someone snaps a “compromising” picture of you and posts it to Facebook or Twitter. They also have “dark rooms” for drinking “shots” so that no one can snap a picture of you drinking when you should not be drinking. By virtue of the fact that you are validated as yourself on Facebook by your friends, so too can your actions in life and on these social platforms validate or expose you to be someone who you say you are or who you are not.
The strange thing about these social platforms, is that the consequences of our actions are still there, maybe even a little more severe than “normal” life. One could argue that the consequences could be amplified 100 fold just by the shear breadth and width of these platforms. Where ordinarily an outburst, a comment, a joke, a rude joke, a racist joke, a photo or a video, might be confined to a spouse, close friends and work colleagues these days, 100 – 200 – 500 – 1000 – 10,000 – 1,000,000 people can know about it in a very, very, short space of time.
You would think that with this in mind, people would limit the amount of info they share on these platforms. They would think before they type, post or upload, but as we get more and more comfortable with these platforms, it seems that more and more “social” blunders are taking place across the net.
Mark Zuckeberg’s dream for Facebook was to “make us better people” – live our lives for all the world to see – it would make us more accountable – more honest. But my question is: are these platforms indeed helping us to be better people or over time, or are they showing / revealing our true character as people?
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