DO THE SMS GENERATION DREAM OF SHEEPS' FACEBOOK PROFILES?

As you may or may not have realised, I have shamelessly pilfered the title of the short story "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" for the subject of this blog post - social networking. What is the point of Facebook? How do we use it? Why has it caused controversy? Where did it all come from? Ah, but in hyperspace "there are no truths, only questions" (Danah Boyd - we'll hear more about her later).

Facebook began as a site where Harvard students could create a profile and talk to others, but even from the beginning it was shrouded in controversy. Mark Zuckerberg, the supposed founder of Facebook, has been accused of stealing the idea from classmates who hired Zuckerberg as a programmer for a remarkably similar social site. The case remains unsolved - read more here.

Facebook has made other people angry too. The initial Zuckerberg scheme was to put pictures of two people up next to each other and get people to vote on who was more attractive (The Facebook), but this was shut down by the Harvard administrators soon after. Offices have banned Facebook because of the number of workers messing about on Facebook instead of working. The biggest controversy came in 2006 when Zuckerberg introduced the "News Feed", which is the home page on Facebook. It details everything all your friends have done in the last little while - status updates, comments, wall posts, everything. This caused a furore as students in particular started to berate Zuckerberg for the invasion of privacy. What these students seem to forget is that they put the stuff on the internet and Facebook can change their policies at any time without undue warning and as users we must be aware of the potential for people to see everything we put on the web and more. As normal, the mass of teenagers checking notifications and just generally interested in technology has seemed to make some people think that Facebook represents everything that is wrong with this country and all Facebook users are feckless twits. Now why would anyone think that? Let's see why and how people use Facebook.

Facebook is a social network online. A social network is just a way of linking people together - I know a guy who knows a guy who know a guy who I could buy a car off. We use Facebook to get in touch and we arrange prices, collection et al. That's one way of using Facebook - making drawn-out processes shorter. However, a great number of people use Facebook to make contact with friends or family. My cousins at university keep in touch with their parents through Facebook, and I arrange things with my friends on Facebook (yes, you did read that correctly, I do in fact have friends). Friends on Facebook are an interesting thing. Do you consider all your "friends" on Facebook to be your friends in real life? It seems to me that "friends" means, where Facebook is concerned, those people whom you talk to most regularly. Calling these people "friends" could be viewed by cynics as a way to make it seem like those who we don't care enough about to actually want to talk to face-to-face are closer to us than they actually are. Danah Boyd has a detailed article on how we use Facebook here.

Mark Zuckerberg

I am all for social networks, but I worry about who my message goes out to. My privacy settings list me as not searchable on Google and only friends can see my profile, but I think that what goes on the internet stays on the internet, and that could potentially be very damaging. You can't actually delete your Facebook account with any great ease, only "deactivate" it, which is a fairly intrusive situation. Why can you put everything on the internet and then not take it off? A situation that highlighted this problem occurred with a software writer - read more here. The BBC have also identified that some seemingly harmless applications could harvest account and identity information, which could be a terrible problem. I worry that future employees can find me on Facebook and that what is supposed to be an outlet for me outside of school ends up reading like a CV, which is a worrying situation. Do I toe the line and miss part of Facebook's objective, or do I go wild and potentially get grilled by universities and potential employees (read what The Times had to say here)?

So that's what's what. Things worth thinking about: am I using Facebook how I want to, how I am supposed to, both? What problems do I face from the material I put on Facebook? Is what I put on Facebook a true reflection of who or what I really am? All this and more up for discussion before next week, when there's more Facebook and a look at the popular photo-sharing site Flickr. Here, of course, are your videos: