My wife emailed me an article from Sunday's Washington Post about When Mom or Dad Asks To Be a Facebook 'Friend'. She found it amusing as she had just sent a Facebook friend request to my mother.
This brought to mind a conversation during last week's Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet. The conversation, about the ubiquity of technology, touched on the availability of personal information online, especially through the growing use of social networking platforms, and how this availability changes the way we interact with each other.
While a lot of people still think that social networking sites are primarily populated by teens, demographic research shows that the users are actually fairly evenly spread among age brackets, with teens being an overall minority.
Corporate social networking has been around for years, with sites like Facebook reaching out to businesses, and sites like Linked In established primarily to serve corporate users.
As a result, we've seen a removal of what Jung referred to as masks, or the different personas that we take on when we interact with different social groups with whom we engage. For example, in the past, one might have a work mask, a family mask, a sports-buddy mask, and a host of other masks depending on one's different social circles.
Today, though, the masks are removed. Your employer can search for your name in an Internet search engine and look up your profile on social networking sites, learning much about your personal life. I know employers who, as a rule, search for applicants' social networking profiles prior to offering an interview, and attorneys who use social networking sites to research participants in legal cases.
All of this in mind, I couldn't help but chuckle at 19-year-old Mike Yeamans who was interviewed for the Washington Post article.
"Don't get me wrong," said Yeamans, who is a computer information systems major. "I love my parents, but there are some parts of my college experience that I want to keep to myself. I chose to go away to school so I could experience a little freedom."
Perhaps Yeamans should ask Justin Seay about keeping some parts of his college experience to himself.
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