A lesson in Facebook
I swore that I would never put my photo on the internet.
With technology these days, a face could be digitally imposed on a donkey’s body and sent around the world in under a minute.
But online message boards and chat rooms have become so mainstream, so comfortable, that I didn’t hold out for long.
Online interactive communities are now big business, with sites like Myspace and Bebo boasting millions of users.
The latest fad site, Facebook, stems from the same idea as the others, (members have a personal profile page, a comments section and albums for photos), except that it is designed to help users keep in touch with people they have actually met in real life, as opposed to helping them meet new cyber friends. But also unlike Myspace, Facebook is more of transparent community.
Upon signing in, the homepage displays a ‘News Feed’ that informs the user of the comments and photos that people in his or her network of ‘Friends’ have been posting. This includes mundane messages, such as “Hi Sally, ROTFL,” to the more extreme, such as, “Rob, the engagement is OFF!”
Users can ‘Tag’ photos with the names of people in them, which not only show up on their friends’ ‘News Feed,’ but also on their personal profile. That means, that if someone posts an embarrassing photo, everyone in his or her network can view it.
And that’s what happened to me.
My ‘News Feed’ alerted that a ‘Friend’ had posted a photo of me. I clicked on the link, which took me to the photo. What uploaded was the most horrific photo I had ever seen of myself.
I was fully clothed, yes, but obviously intoxicated and acting less than professional. I contacted the ‘Friend’ that had posted the photo and demanded that he delete it immediately; which he did the following day without question.
This incident, although trivial, brought to my attention the ease by which your image can travel, and how powerless you are to stop it.
But what amazes me most about these community websites is the unending number of (very) young girls that willingly post scantily clad photos of themselves in their own photo sections. They have usually taken these pictures with their webcams, in their bedrooms, and think that either no one will recognize them, or that no one will care.
But these girls do not realize that once a photo is on the net, it is out there for good. There is no getting it back, no noticing the mistake and hitting the backspace button. No, that blurry photo of your 11-year-old daughter in her Sponge Bob panties could be the desktop background for a 72-year-old man in Russia right now; and there is nothing you can do about it.
Not only is it a danger to have these types of photos of children on the Internet, but it may also jeopardize their reputation or employment opportunities.
Are we becoming a more open society because information is so easily accessible? Or are we just being naïve to the fact that things that we do on the Internet can affect our future?
It is rare to not have your face on the Internet now, and short of keeping a bag over your head, there is little you can do to keep yourself off of it. And even though that photo of me was deleted, there may be more out there that I am not aware of.
At least I can be sure that I haven’t contributed to my own embarrassment, as in my younger days I resisted the temptation to add another nude and naïve body to the Internet.
