SNSs, The New Letter

In the beginning, Boyd and Ellison provide a good synopsis on what a social network site is, what it entails, and throughout the rest of the article, they display examples that illuminate this new form of communication.

One piece I found particularly interesting was the distinction of social network sites and networking. Though I do not believe that networking is strictly bounded to the idea of “…relationship initiation, often between strangers” (Boyd, Ellison 2). I didn’t view SNSs as being a large proponent of just strengthening relationships. In discussing different social network sites, the authors references, Cyworld, an SNS based in Korea, and say, “ …that 85% of that study’s respondents “listed the maintenance and reinforcement of pre-existing social networks as their main motive for Cyworld” (Boyd, Ellison 11). The authors declare that these sites main functions are to help keep relationships, not build them.

With that being said, I was confused on one notion, the term “friend”. If social network sites are mostly used to stay in touch with people you already know, why can’t they be recognized as a friend? The article says that “…the reasons people connect are varied” and yet they provide numerous statistical analysis that the foremost reason for connectivity is to sustain relationships. I know relationships don’t always have to be friend-based, but I felt that this portion of the article should have been explored more.

There were also a few things that I disagreed with or felt was alarming.

1) “Social network sites also provide rich sources of naturalistic behavioral data. Profile and linkage data
      from SNSs can be gathered either through the use of automated collection techniques or through datasets provided directly from the company…(Boyd, Ellison 10).

- This quote demonstrates how the structure and functioning of these social networking sites can help provide information on a larger populace; a group of people that perhaps could not be assembled as easily than on the world wide web. Still, does the general public want to be the subjects of anyone’s statistic? What exactly is being gathered, who is receiving this information, who else has access to it, and for what purpose is the data being gathered? These are all questions I believe the article and us readers should ponder and pay attention to. Which leads us to my second point:

2) Privacy

-In addition to the dozen of sites mentioned within the article, Boyd and Ellison pay particular attention to Facebook. They mention that “Unlike other SNSs, Facebook users are unable to make their full profiles public to all users” (Boyd, Ellison 8). While reading, I immediately said: well, that’s not true. Facebook profiles are not only abled to be fully viewed by users, but by anyone who can grab a computer and type into Google. Google has made it fully probable to look at Facebook profiles by typing in a person’s name, a phrase mentioned in a previous conversation. I have told many of my friends to change their profile privacy terms because I was able to find their pictures and conversations on the web!

So what can we do? That is the question.

All of these SNSs (unless I am unaware), asks the person for a sublet of personal information while creating a profile. The article says, “Acquisti and Gross (2006) argue that there is often a disconnect between students’ desire to protect privacy and their behaviors…” and they go on to talk about the “privacy paradox” (Boyd, Ellison 11). The paper later describes how in some forms this is not true, but I would like to take a different approach.

If we lie, we create perjury.

I know this is extreme, but let’s think about this. Submitting false information onto the web and saying that this is who we are, is against the law. Yet, we are subjected to provide it and at the same time, are thought of as being non-consciousness of the breaching of our information. How private can we be?