The formative years spent in high school and college is a collage of ideologies and personalities and faces. Kids meet in the cafeteria and bars, develop relationships, create dialog, and in that time develop their own personalities. The basis for social media sites like Facebook and Twitter (of interaction, usually age-appropriate) has been the structure of the American grade school lifestyle for generations. Social media has given these human interactions a webpage, this much is obvious. More telling is the onscreen presentation of these ties and interactions building and falling apart in real time.
Mary Madden’s research for Pew Internet Project observes different age groups in managing the privacy settings on social media sites. Young people made up most of the users on social media websites, and were also more likely to delete content they posted or untag themselves from pictures. All users were more likely to restrict access to their profiles (58%), with women more likely than men to do so (67% vs. 48%).
Why are young people more prone to using social media, and why are they deleting their stuff more than other age groups? There are a myriad of reasons, but the simplest is: they were born unto cyberspace. Facebook is about to turn ten, and a bunch of fresh faces came of age in the social media hailstorm that followed. Where once people could learn basic social behaviors on the playground, which includes saying the wrong thing in front of the wrong group of people, they now must contend with the “permanent” marks left by virtual text. Word of mouth becomes Shared posts.
Choice words that could once float off into the linoleum halls on a huff of teen angst, perhaps jotted into the margins of binders the world over, could now sit and stew in the online, public/private forums that people map out for themselves. Staring at a screen and feeling something, reacting to it alone (no matter how many people you’re contacting at once), is much different than the face-to-face interactions that create precedent for one’s actions and others’ reactions. Their personalities and ideologies shift from year to year, so these “profiles” become daily relics of a past that is updated by the minute, but can be commented on well into the future.
More pertinent questions to the findings however, and one I fear I am too removed from to accurately comment on, are: why are women more likely than men to shield their profiles? Is there a through line between privacy settings and the disparity in gender-specific harassment? Is it just harassment from men, or perhaps targeted bullying from other girls? Does the content posted by women negatively affect them more in the future in regards to seeking employment than when compared to men?
Also: why would media users with the highest levels of education report the most difficulty in managing the privacy controls on their profiles? Is this a matter of “time spent on _____” in comparison to those NOT being schooled, and perhaps have more time for “social media distractions”? Could it be that more education raises more concerns, and so controlling privacy becomes a concern to the educated folk who are confused as to why the privacy controls can seem underdeveloped?
I think (although I can certainly not prove) that education has a lot to do with how concerned people are about their privacy on social media. As we've been discussing in class all the concern surrounding privacy is pretty complex. The legality of information sharing is debatable, the legal jargon on user agreements is pretty much impossible to get through without a law degree and the scope of online regulation is difficult to summarize to say the least. I think that educated people are probably more aware of these issues and thus are more nervous about how they represent themselves online. I also think this ties into why women are more concerned about their privacy settings. I don't think it is specifically because women are more prone to being harassed online, but because education about predators and stranger danger sort of situations is targeted towards women and because of this women are more aware of the risks.
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