In my friends circle, it always amazes me how one group have fully embraced social media but in another, it has been almost completely and deliberately been ignored.
The reasons given are usually two-fold:
- I don’t feel comfortable sharing personal information with everyone.
- I know who my friends are. I can speak to them on the phone or go and see them. Why do I need to go to Facebook to talk to them. That’s quite sad.
I don’t know if its because of what I do or what my background is, but I just don’t understand this attitude. Sure, Facebook aren’t exactly whiter than white when it comes to privacy but they have had to cave in to user demands and the huge public outcry when Facebook’s opt-out default settings were brought to light. The options now available on Facebook’s settings pages are in-depth and quite comprehensive in my opinion, though to less versed people they may still appear somewhat confusing.
In any case, I believe much of this privacy stuff is sorted though the privacy groups and any other interested parties should still keep a close watch on Facebook as they hold so much of our information.
You can now control exactly who sees what on Facebook. If you don’t want certain people to see status updates or any of them, you can do that. If you want some of your photos only visible to certain people, you can do that too. If you don’t want to put up photos of your new baby, fair enough as this is more about superstition than privacy really and I kind of get this. But otherwise, this couldn’t be an opinion/attitude I agree less with. Its not even old-fashioned really, especially since this is the generation that the Internet has developed with. I think it is part ignorance and part stubbornness.
For me its a missed opportunity too. We’re at the age where most of us are married and about to or have already started families. This is the moment where you start losing touch with old friends even more than before. Opportunities to meet reduce further and you have truck loads to catch up on when you do meet. In today’s world, keeping in touch couldn’t be easier even with our ever busier lives. The ideal way to keep in touch now with everyone is to see/read/hear snippets of what people are doing, thinking, going, gone. Guess what? Tools like Facebook, Twitter and Memfy allow just that so I do feel that its a shame that some of my close friends don’t take advantage. I know they’ll be there if I really need them, but would rather not have to wait for those exceptional times to catch up.
