I’m organising a panel discussion provisionally titled “The Dark Side Of Social Media”. This is going to be about how Social Media (MySpace, YouTube etc etc) has a ‘bad’ side, and it is not quite the new media nirvana some make it out to be. The Kathy Sierra incident is just once recent, extreme example.
For instance consider these issues surrounding social media which remain unresolved:
• Child safety remains an issue
• Anonymity can promote bullying and a distopian environment
• The ability to “game” social media (Asking people for Diggs, begging for Myspace links for a crap pop band etc) means the currency of social media is falling
• Identity theft – Anyone can create be anyone’s MySpace page
• Privacy – if you expose yourself to the world via blogs/twitter, doesn’t the world bite back? What about Government invasion?
• Google – gradually it will know everything about us and our relationships – does this ‘hard wire’ out reputations? Your mistakes, your accusations are always there to haunt you, and worse still, they don’t date. Are Life Streams and Life Caching really a good idea?
• Brands and their reputations in the social media space – are they playing with fire?
• Online campaigning, lobbying and hi-jacking of political websites – how it can backfire
If you have some thoughts on these matters or are gagging to be on the panel (more later on who it’s for) then get in touch (see mbites.com/contact) and I’ll have a think.
Meanwhile, if you have a more positive outlook than me, check this out:
“Goodness 2.0: How can wikis, blogs, social networks, virtual worlds and other web 2.0 tools create new and innovative ways for charitable and campaigning organisations to work internally, to communicate and to engage?”
Hi Mike,
A few more off the
Hi Mike,
A few more off the top of my head.
* Adding to the privacy strand – this has a time element too. Anything one does or says online could potentially be saved forever (even if it wasn’t you that put it up there). This could cause lots of problems for people who had fiery childhoods for example. It’ll be interesting to see how politicians start to react to the media having much more direct access to their back-dated private life.
* Some interesting stuff in the news today about embarrasing videos taken of teachers to be taken off Youtube, definitely a topical and pertinent issue.
* I think the identity theft issue is a big one too – as our online identity becomes more important and gives us access to more and more services, all that seems to stand between someone else and my identity is in some cases the password to an email account.
I’ll be interested in coming to this, will look out for the date.
You could also question
You could also question whether the wisdom of crowds is always a good thing. What’s the online equivalent of the mobs that hounded innocent pediatricians in South-coast English towns a couple of years back. The Kaiser Chiefs described it well:
We are the angry mob
We read the papers everyday day
We like who like
We hate who we hate
But we´re also easily swayed
Nice.
Funny – i not long commented
Funny – i not long commented on joi ito’s blog about taking photo’s of strangers.
http://weblivz.blogspot.com/2007/04/photographing-strangers.html
It may well depend on the culture but i suspect even then there are limits.
Do i want my 15 minutes of fame to be the one agnry minute i got caught punching a guy taking a photo of me?!
Sounds like a really great
Sounds like a really great idea.
There was an interesting point raised by Andrew Orlowski of The Register at the first Chinwag event (for which you were the chairman) about the narrowing of the conversation which online can perversely cause, and the structure of inteollerance and door-closing that happens online. Be intereting to explore that – how open minded the discussion groups really are.
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