With more than 500 million users, a decade of gathering personal information and a virtual headlock on the social web phenomena under it's belt, Facebook is poised for global take over. By leveraging two pillars of modern humanity--technology and vanity, FB has quietly amassed a mega database that will soon have Google looking like the public libraries to which it has itself laid siege: fragmented, outdated and losing relevance. It's no longer a secret that the Matrix aka Facebook, with new features like 'Places' and 'Likes' has positioned itself to become the ultimate resource for public records, marketing research, advertising, and social networking powered by a location aware, personalized search engine. Sounds useful. So how's that bad?
Well, that depends on how you use FB, what information you share, and what you expect to get out of your experience. With just a marginal amount of thought and effort one may connect with people of like minds to build a bullet-proof personal brand, family tree, or virtual time capsule. On the other hand, the same effort with less thoughtfulness can result in severe negative consequences.
Consider the kids.
Briefly imagine how differently your life may be today if your baby book complete with comments and hash tags was available to millions of people, corporations, and governments--essentially giving the world resources to define you before you could define yourself. In this book are all sorts of images, information about your social class, your family, hints of who you could become?all fodder for interpretation and innuendo.
Imagine if we had access to a Facebook for President Obama's mother. Would she have posted endless images of him as a child in Muslim dress while living in Indonesia? Would she have poured her raw thoughts and emotions about politics, religion, her marriage and divorce and other lively content, similar to the content that crowds the Facebok 'walls' of many young women? If so, how would this have affected President Obama?s public image and his chances of becoming POTUS?
Facebook itself requires users to be over 13 years of age and in high school to comply with it's terms of use. Obviously, this is their effort to prevent children from damaging their personal and family image allowing the world to define who they are before they have understanding of who they may want to be. Unfortunately, most kids will have been already thoroughly exploited on Facebook by mommy and daddy before they ever even sign up!
Are parents cutting off their children's feet to spite their face--book?
Whether you 'Like' or 'Dislike', chances are those cute little pictures of the kids nestled between those drunken images and posts about whatever night club you frequent, or random thoughts posted after a rough day at at work won?t help your children's chances of getting into that prestigious university he/she may one day aspire too. So, next time you're about to post a family album underneath the one called 'Just Me' that offers salacious details of the life you chose to live -- consider the kid(s). Give them the space to define who they are before offering them up to the harsh, judgmental world via Facebook.