Facebook began as a simple networking site in 2004, set up by a gang of Harvard students to make meeting each other and sharing information simpler. Since then it grew to include other universities and educational establishments, large companies, and finally, by 2006, anybody who fancied a bit of super-easy blogging.
When Facebook became available to people other than students, there were reactions of horror. Especially when “grown-ups” (lecturers, teachers, and potential employers) started logging on.
Authority figures using Facebook are akin to adults hanging around in the wendy-house; not strictly wrong per say, but jarring, a little bit creepy, and morally ambiguous. What are they doing there? Why do they want to see what we're doing there?
Some students have leapt upon this issue with moral outrage. Last year there was uproar in the city of dreaming spires, when Oxford University staff used Facebook to check if students were breaking rules during rowdy post-exam antics. Alex Hill, then a maths and philosophy student, was one of the casualties, caught out flinging shaving foam about in a Facebook photo.
"I'm outraged.” She said, according to The Daily Mail. “It's truly bizarre that they're paying staff to sit and go through Facebook."
It is indeed bizarre, Alex, and it goes two ways. A survey by the Teacher Support Network last year found that 17% of teachers have been victims of “cyberbullying”, with students sourcing embarrassing photos of their teachers on Facebook and Bebo and passing them around for a laugh.
Of course, teachers having a sneaky peek at what unsuspecting students are up to has always happened; who has been caught smoking on the way to school, or run into a teacher whilst bunking down the shops of an afternoon? Students taking the mick out of teachers, with or without visual aides, is also nothing new. The difference now, however, is that we can all do it so much more quickly, reaching more people, and, potentially, breaking more laws.
A lot of people are very upset about Facebook and other social networking sites. Such sites have been blamed for making kids into recluses, with eating disorders, suicidal tendencies and a penchant for black skull-and-crossbone hoodies. They have also been seen as the end of everyday manners, when people wrote letters sealed with wax, touched their hats to ladies, and, more specifically, spoke to each other face-to-face. Finally, the big complaint is that social networking sites allows people unusually high levels access to others' personal data.
All of these concerns are overreactions. It's the last one that really gets me. Yes, Facebook allows you to share your most intimate details with the world, but equally gives you the option not to, by putting in place privacy settings that control who can see your information. This is easily done. To ignore this option is tantamount to walking into a dodgy pub on a Friday night, standing on a table, and shouting:
'Ladies and Gentlemen! My name is [insert name], I live at [insert address], and my workplace is [insert workplace]. I leave a key under the mat of my front door, so do come on in and help yourself to my valuables and credit cards.
'Oh, and once, I was so drunk I was sick on my own pizza and didn't notice [hold up a drunken photo of you taken by an unkind friend on a mad night out].'
If you are wise enough to avoid doing this in the real world, then you are more than capable of avoiding it in the virtual world. Social networking sites themselves are not a threat. They are only as stupid and dangerous as the people that use them.
