My final project is an examination of children's use of Facebook, the safety precautions that parents can take and a brief overview of the identity that children using the site have. I utilized many of the articles for this class, additional journal articles and a few books in addition to observing my daughter's facebook account.
Rules that govern Facebook are below:
Facebook is a site that states "Comment Policy: We love your comments, but please be respectful of others. We reserve the right to delete profane, harassing, abusive and spam comments and to block repeat offenders"
It is a very liberal website that lets its users "police" itself. Afterall, if you find somebody offensive you could simply "unfriend" the person. Facebook has privacy options and some rules and/or suggestions regarding usage.
Some of the privacy policy states that children under 13 should not try to create an Facebook account, and parents need to teach their children about internet safety.
Three examples of the rules being broken:
1. My daughters account, age 12... but I am her friend and I also felt that it would prevent her from creating her own account in a sneaky manner behind my back!
2.Some of her friends are not using their real last names, but rather another friend's last name.. Probably sneaking around so their parents don't find out.
3.Blatant lying about one's age to create an account. There is no way, my daughter's Facebook friend and classmate was born in 1931- that would make him 80 years old!!
Our assignment also asks us to think as an administrator and relate the example to our readings. This is a difficult one as our readings focused primarily on smaller SNSs (compared to Facebook) where content of the site itself could be user introduced or influenced. I do not think that Facebook meets the criteria of relating to some of the articles, so I will begin with some efforts an administrator may take in regards to enforcing Facebook rules and refer to class readings when possible and then I will give some examples from other sites and compare them to our readings.
Facebook is such a large SNS, I think it is an extremely huge and difficult job to monitor and enforce rules. Facebook operates on self-awareness as I read about in Gazan'a article, When Online Communities Become Self-Aware, for example " users acknowledge themselves as members of the community, and express particular ideas of appropriate behavior". Thus, I would believe that friends within the community have common interests and if they were to offend eachother they would simply "unfriend" besides, most people do not want to hurt their friends feelings and most facebook accounts are supportive- there is a friendship or community established.
Facebook does not fit the typical online community described in Cosley's article, How Oversight Improves Member-Maintained Communities, as tasks do not fall on community owners. Facebook is a huge SNS with will over 500 million active users, http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
but but perhaps individual accounts could fit into Cosley's collective effort model in which regular users are rated thus possibly increasing motivation for others to participate more. This would be reliant on whether the individual user uses the friend rating application or takes into account the "recent" friends.
As for the age requirement rule and its under age users, perhaps programs could monitor some of the more suspicious date of births such as the 80 year old seventh grader, but other than somebody making a complaint, I think this area is extremely difficult to police. I find that Facebook utilized the disclaimer and recommendation for parental control and education of minors in internet safety.
Comparisons of readings to other sites:
In Gazan'a Understanding the Rogue User, there is an interesting explanation of personality dimensions! The article provided tables with rogue behavior and descriptions, that I found informative and somewhat funny in the fact that I've seen many those behaviors exhibited :)
A board that I visit on occasion, is a rosacea board- and at times people have reprimanded others on the site who seem to be have an unreasonable sense of entitlement by responding to some questions where they may have no experience nor knowledge in or recommending products in an "pushy" manner that may be because of possible financial gain. I attempted to locate a screen shot of this, but could not- it seems the administrators have been more active than in the past.
My final topic to relate to our readings and to SNSs is the article by Julian Dibbell, Mutilated Furries, Flying Phalluses: Put the Blame on Griefers, the Sociopaths of the Virtual World, this article described the callus and destructive behavior of individuals that find pleasure in disrupting virtual worlds. As a prior student of Dr. Nahls', I had explored the Second Life world and heard about these griefers- and although I cannot provide a screen shot- I have heard of the pink flamingos that were left everywhere and how Dr. Nahl and others had to clean up these pink flamingos!
I find it hard to believe that people would put that much time and effort into destructive behavior but I suppose that it evident in the hackers, spammers and people infecting computers with harmful viruses and advertisements. I think we all see this with pop-ups and such.(no screen shot needed- you all know the different spams out there)!
The last topic of our assignment has us list "unwritten" rules for our site. Again, my final project of Facebook does not quite fit into these rules- as every Facebook account is so individual and users are able to manage their own account by monitoring who they friend. But, I imagine most sites have these common rules: Be respectful, refrain from profanity, refrain from commercial use (support boards), be careful what you link onto (virus, cookies, etc), and finally be mindful of safety issues (address, private information, etc).
Your 4th rule: "Be careful what you link onto" is great advice. Now that everyone is shortening the urls this is becoming more difficult. Sometimes I get really nervous about where tiny urls will land me.
ReplyDeleteYou mention several times that the size of FB makes it difficult to monitor. I wonder if they do most of it offsite through the media. Yet, sometimes all I ever hear about social media in the news are warnings.
Personally, I try to keep everyone accountable for their actions on FB. If I read a post I don't like or am bothered by I tell them. I guess I do this because I figure no one else will.
Facebook is a huge online community that makes surveillance difficult. As you mentioned, some of your daughter’ friends blatantly tell a lie about their names and ages, this recalls me one reading of week 6 that a person has the opportunity to shape his/her online identity to what he/she wants. I guess the “lying” young users did it for fun; however, there may be other reasons that deserve us to look into. Like Dr. Gazan’s analysis of roguish behaviors by means of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, the investigation of why teenagers manipulate their online identity can make use of some frameworks about the adolescence’s psychological development.
ReplyDeleteThe function of “unfriend” in Facebook is a way to protect individuals from profanity and offense. However, it may be hard for a teenager to recognize what behaviors or language has already been profane and offensive that the account need unfriending. So, parental surveillance is very important. Even though Facebook has some brief guidelines of how minors of 13 years old act on Facebook and what parents can do to keep their children in safe, I think more research is needed. For example, as for the parents whose children do not use real names or show real ages on their own profile, how can they monitor their children’s online safety?
At the Association for Education and Communication Technology (AECT) 2010, we brought a paper on adolescent awareness on using FB through a conference sessions. At that time we discussed several aspects about how to make adolescent more aware about etiquette and security system of Facebook. A friend told me that her 3rd grader asked her to be a friend on FB. This is an evidence parallel with one of the broken rule that you mentioned. Another participant on our session also mentioned that her friend has an account for her lovely puppy. I think more interesting can be found when we try to analyze FB with different perspectives.
ReplyDeleteSuch insightful comments! You are not the only parent that has allowed their underage child to have a facebook. Many parents feel that without a facebook their children will experience social exclusion and/or perhaps rebel and create an account secretly. So why not agree to it and monitor their children's activity by friending them? It does seem like an awfully hard time to be a parent of a child in the y generation. Constant vigilance will only get you so far...just like anyone else, children can easily set up multiple accounts to get around parental supervision.
ReplyDeleteAnd sad to say, but I have heard of students unfriending their family members as they get older. Aww, growing pains.
Good comments overall, but make sure you read the posts and discussions of the other people who are looking at Facebook to get a better idea of the kinds of unwritten rules that you might generate.
ReplyDeleteYou're right to point out that unfriending is one of the ways people can manage their own experience, privacy tools/settings are another. But in the case of your project, you might try to focus on something more specific to the group you're interested in. For example, do you see any evidence that children (or those who purport to be...) are exhibiting evidence of being active members of a community, such as debating appropriate behavior? Or are they passively "playing" Facebook? One of the attractions of video games is that inappropriate behavior in real life is perfectly appropriate on the screen--might that partially explain some children's online behavior on FB?
I agree that underage users of social networking sites is a problem that needs to be understood by parents. I admit to lying about my age on an SNS in order to gain entry. It is a very common thing, and I feel that it is the parent's responsibility to monitor what their children does online. In today's age, there are a lot of risks that young children just don't understand and it takes a guardian to make sure that they are safe online. Facebook does a good job, in m opinion of shaping a user's personal experience for the reasons that you presented.
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