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The other day my best friend from college and I decided to not “talk” on Facebook, but to use old fashioned email and the phone. My husband pointed out that sending a message on Facebook is really no different than email, but to us, the public nature of Facebook felt like it was somehow detracting from the authenticity of our friendship. Like leaving comments on photos and walls is fine with Facebook friends, but somehow felt less real between us – like phoning it in. Part of the reason why is that we both acknowledged how most people on Facebook are really curating their profiles, putting their best or happiest foot forward, giving off a certain impression of themselves or creating a personae that doesn’t give the full picture of who we are or what we’re really going through.

Over the past few months, I’ve been posting a little more on Facebook including some personal photos. Since my Twitter account feeds into my Facebook status, I’ve been getting more comments there on “tweets” than @replies on Twitter. As a blogger with a following, I have more “friends” than the average Facebook user my age, and most of them are indeed readers or professional contacts. Like many younger Facebook users, I haven’t taken the time to set specific privacy settings around who can see what, mostly because up until a few months ago, I didn’t post anything that personal. Whenever I do post a photo now, I have to think, “Do I care whether my readers or professional acquaintances see that photo of my grandma?” So far, I think I’m ok with that, but if I keep posting those types of photos, I may put a wall around who can see them.

There has definitely been a big shift in media coverage of social networking from panic around stranger danger and bullying to the issue of how much we all share on these sites and with whom – parents and teens, students and teachers, bosses and employees. Clay Shirky highlighted a new report over at Boing Boing from James Grimmelmann at NYU Law School titled: Facebook and the Social Dynamics of Privacy. It’s lengthy, but well worth reading. My takeaway was that it’s not so much what legislation, the companies or more privacy settings can do to solve the new issues these sites raise (since most of the privacy drama is caused by transgressions from our “friends”), but about education — what the report refers to as “culturally appropriate education.”

To me this education for younger social networking users should be peer-based. When I speak to parents, they ask me if I can go speak to students. I think what would be more effective is training teens and college students to do this speaking and outreach to their peers. By integrating real-life stories of privacy violations (and encouraging youth to share their own) into a presentation that ends with practical advice on how to manage your online identity(ies), we would take a big step forward in addressing some of these new challenges.

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Categorized under: Totally Wired, Web

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