Recently I had to rebuild a couple of work computers because some people had used a proxy bypass to get around the content filter and firewall so that they could access several social networking sites. In case you didn’t know, we IT people don’t put those sorts of protections in place to thwart users from having a good time, but rather to cover our own asses and keep needless repairs to a minimum. Besides, no one ever claimed work was supposed to be fun, otherwise it would be called happy fun time instead of work.
While social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook have a fair amount of innocuous content mostly directed toward online dating, inane ranting and probably far too revealing personal information, there is a dark side to it. MySpace has been repeatedly linked to sex offenders, child molesters, pornographic content, character assassination and even a few cases of people committing suicide due to continual harassment on the site. Not to mention the time and energy spent updating, reading, and playing an idiotic game of one-upmanship to keep your profile more cutting edge and ironic than your colleagues and friends. I imagine the productivity loss is on par with that of chain smokers and heavy drinkers.
The practice referred to now as micro blogging has seen a huge increase in popularity due to these sites. Micro blogging is when you write short, usually incomprehensible, blurbs about what inane things you did that day. It is most entertaining to know that spacedgurl69 had a greasy burger for lunch and cried about the size of her ass afterwards. I can see the therapeutic benefit to this, but people in the olden days used journals or diaries and very rarely let other people read them.
Letting people know about your hobbies, quotes you like, your preference for music / food / sexual partners / etc., favorite web comics and other such things might seem like a good idea, few realize that pretty much everyone can see this information. I like my boss and most of my coworkers, but I don’t want them to see what I do outside of work. I really don’t want people who could fire me to know what I do on odd weekends when I am really bored, especially if I was still wild, single, and in my twenties. I would rather charge people for those sorts of stories and probably could make money doing it too.
It is also a sad state of affairs when people count their so-called friends by the number of little cutesy pictures with a badly misspelled note beside it on a website. It has become popular for politicians to claim to have millions of friends based on these sites. I hardly have time to keep up with the handful of real friends I have, I can’t imagine the time it takes when you got millions. But then again, if our current crop of idiots in power had that many friends they wouldn’t have had time to screw up so damn many things. Think about it, if they had been perusing their friend’s social networking pages instead of doing whatever it is they supposedly do, we’d still be able to make it through an airport ‘security’ checkpoint in less than an hour, the US dollar would still be worth more than it’s Canuck counterpart, the oil market wouldn’t be such a mess, and best of all 4300 or so soldiers and who knows how many tens of thousands of Iraqis would still be alive.
While researching this article, I found a petition supporting MySpace removal from block lists in schools here. Some of the responses, with the associated terrible spelling and grammar, are about the best reasons I can find for keeping it blocked in schools.
Links:
MySpace sex offender and other problems
MySpaceIM security problems
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySpace#Security
http://blogs.zdnet.com/ip-telephony/?p=2588
