technoculture203-09

For a number of reasons I don't use Facebook. Or LinkedIn or any other social networking site. The main reason is I worked on the recruitment team at one of NZ's big corporates and saw how recruitment strategies utilise social network sites. I found the way in which the social networking sites were willing to engage with us troubling, hence my absence. We weren't alone in this by the way, it is a global trend. Whenever I've mentioned this to people there is a sense of surprise, that somehow Facebook can only be viewed as a source of good. As we can see with this story, not necessarily. Only so much can be seen unless you sign up to a corporate site but once you have you would be amazed at what people show, and not necessarily in a good way. Aside from being a salutary lesson this strikes me as a use of the social networks that we didn't really discuss, which is the real, and regular use of this information by external participants to make judgements. Which kind of defeats the notion of social networking. It also leads to the idea that because of this we might end up moderating how we communicate online.