Facebook is on everyone’s agenda. I am attending a 5-part webinar hosted by HigherEd Experts on everything Facebook. It covers a lot of the basics, but Fred Stutzman, a PhD student-turned-lecturer comes at it with a deep understanding of what’s going on in this space, in terms of offline-to-online socialization, identity production, privacy and that tricky beast called “social surveillance.”
What’s that?
It’s a phrase that has its origins in deep surveillance methods that include location monitoring and data mining. Which is what social networks have a potential to do, when you think about it. Students are using social networks to do more than upload photos of their dorm. They keep tabs on their circle of friends in a form of benign surveillance.
Because of the rapid shift in demographics, there seems to be two Facebooks separated by an invisible line. Tread carefully when crossing over from your domain into theirs. Last year, a group calling themselves “Students against Facebook” created a sort of a backlash – using Facebook! – against its tracking/surveillance feature.
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