Living online is so second nature to us now, that most of us don't even give it much thought that we have put so much personal information about ourselves out there, for strangers to know...and exploit. But this came home to many when Facebook's privacy settings got complicated and people just didn't bother to wade through any of it and their 'default' settings was leaking information from their accounts. Google Plus had their bad-hair day earlier in the game, when everyone could see each other's most frequent contacts. and woe-be-it if ex-wives or ex-husbands (or an office colleague) were showing up there!
People's lazy and careless online behaviour has come back to haunt them, and many have ended up losing jobs or getting divorced because of their Facebook indiscretions. So people have become warier and now realise that once something is online, it pretty much stays that way, especially if Google caches it. In this Havas International report - The Digital Life - it states that one man asked for all his Facebook updates from the social media service and got 1,222 PDFs from them, and this included all his deleted posts as well.
So now both young and old people feel that privacy is something that is not maintained properly, and the older generation in particular think that the younger generation don't know how to keep some things private. This perception, according to the report, is something much of the younger crowd agrees with. This lack of inhibitions online is happening along with many changes in the social fabric, such as nuclear families disintegrating to single mom homes, of elderly people not getting enough respect. Or even not many elderly people being around to act like a guide, philosopher and friend to the younger generation.
While everyone enjoys the freedom of speech and entitlement that goes with having a Twitter or Facebook account, it does not fill in the void left behind by diminishing face-to-face conversations and interactions. The sense of loneliness can become even more acute, because even as most of us are in touch with more people than ever before - the quality of those relationships may be superficial at best. We seem to have exchanged quality for quantity now. For instance, we know what a friend had for breakfast because she updates her FB status, but we don't recall how her voice sounds on the phone anymore.
The Digital Life report sets out all of this modern day dilemmas in graphic detail, and the fact that so many people are bothered by it is good news. At the least, being complacent is not on their agenda yet!
Read the entire report here: http://www.prosumer-report.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2012/09/this-digital-life.pdf
People's lazy and careless online behaviour has come back to haunt them, and many have ended up losing jobs or getting divorced because of their Facebook indiscretions. So people have become warier and now realise that once something is online, it pretty much stays that way, especially if Google caches it. In this Havas International report - The Digital Life - it states that one man asked for all his Facebook updates from the social media service and got 1,222 PDFs from them, and this included all his deleted posts as well.
So now both young and old people feel that privacy is something that is not maintained properly, and the older generation in particular think that the younger generation don't know how to keep some things private. This perception, according to the report, is something much of the younger crowd agrees with. This lack of inhibitions online is happening along with many changes in the social fabric, such as nuclear families disintegrating to single mom homes, of elderly people not getting enough respect. Or even not many elderly people being around to act like a guide, philosopher and friend to the younger generation.
While everyone enjoys the freedom of speech and entitlement that goes with having a Twitter or Facebook account, it does not fill in the void left behind by diminishing face-to-face conversations and interactions. The sense of loneliness can become even more acute, because even as most of us are in touch with more people than ever before - the quality of those relationships may be superficial at best. We seem to have exchanged quality for quantity now. For instance, we know what a friend had for breakfast because she updates her FB status, but we don't recall how her voice sounds on the phone anymore.
The Digital Life report sets out all of this modern day dilemmas in graphic detail, and the fact that so many people are bothered by it is good news. At the least, being complacent is not on their agenda yet!
Read the entire report here: http://www.prosumer-report.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2012/09/this-digital-life.pdf
