Together While Apart: Virtual Families and Friends

My Space, Facebook Help Catch Criminals

Obviously, some criminals are not the sharpest knifes in the drawer. They're posting evidence of their crimes on social networking sites, helping law enforcement catch them, and victims identify them. Click.

Trade-off: Giving Up Privacy for Transparency

The theory is that the transparency of online social networks like Facebook tightens social bonds because we remain in the peripheral vision of our acquaintances and therefore it also increases trust. Maybe, overall that's true. Staying in touch with far more people is far easier. Lunch dates are far easier to arrange. People you might have forgotten remain in your conscious network.

But as we become more transparent, through weekly, daily or even hourly "status updates" through social networks, we are no longer as self-protective as we need to be, or if we are self-protective, it can create distrust. If there is now a new expectation of transparency, particularly among the young, if someone suddenly reduces their transparency by upping their privacy settings, that can create distrust. Marissa Mayer of Google offered an illustration in a recent interview with Charlie Rose:

Track Location of Children, Parents, Close Friends With Google Latitude

Google Latitude lets you see your friends on a map on Google Maps for mobile and iGoogle. Use Latitude to plan an impromptu meetup, see that a loved one got home safely, or just stay in touch with friends. www.google.com/latitude.

How Social Networking (Facebook, Twitter) Is Changing Society

The New York Times Magazine piece, "Brave New World of Digital Intimacy," is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the social networking phenomenon. Tools like Facebook and Twitter are reducing the loneliness, alienation and rugged individualism of the late 20th century. That era was dominated by one-way, passive television-watching. That era saw masses of people uprooted from close-knit small towns to disconnected and impersonal suburbs. They commuted to cities in automobiles by themselves, and moved often for job opportunities, recreating themselves frequently. A few years here, a few years there, a few years at the next place. It was hard for these baby boomers and Generation X'ers to keep up with people. Many have had a tendency to bowl alone; they've become "disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and our democratic structures."

In this new era, dominated by Generation Y'ers and Millenials (born between 1982 and 2000), we are more likely to engage in interaction online, networking than television-watching, more likely to communicate routinely with family, friends, neighbors, and engage with democratic structures. Through social networking it's easy to arrange carpools, trade on Ebay or barter on Craigslist.  With social networking, people are returning to small-town-like connections where you keep up with people all your life that you've known since elementary school.  Yes, privacy is diminished, but so has loneliness. Instead of feeling like rugged individualists who must make it in the world on our own, without the help of others, our "ambiant awareness" of social ties and connections is now constant. We are living in an electronic village and looking out for each other. A communitarian mindset replaces the libertarian "every man for yourself / you're on your own" mindset and of the late 20th and early 21st century and perhaps not coincidentally, the cowboy diplomacy of the Reagan/Bush years is coming to an end.

Books like Millenials Rising: The Next Generation, and  Millenial Makeover devle in some depth on these trends, although they don't devote a lot of space specifically to social networking because it's so new.    

How to Friend Mom, Dad, the Boss on Facebook Without Giving Up Your Privacy

It's all in the privacy settings. You can block certain users from automatically receiving your status updates or automatically seeing all pictures of you. The New York Times explains how to do it.

Not sure changing the settings completely solves the problem, however. Many users want Mom, Dad, significant others, ex's, prospective romantic interests and the Boss to receive certain updates that enhance reputation, just not all updates that indicate goofing off, making mistakes, screwing up or around.

Surely you don't want to reveal too much and advertise your angst to everyone. Some Facebook users seem to have lost all discretion, while others reveal virtually nothing about themselves.

Those of us who link our Facebook status updates to Twitter risk seeming too chatty and obsessed with sharing information about ourselves or things we're interested in, but if you never update your status and reveal nothing what's the point of being on Facebook except to lurk on what others are doing? Only about 10 percent of Facebook users updated their status daily in early 2009. That number is likely to increase as more people become accustomed to Facebook. Then another problem will arise when you're getting status updates several times a day from your 150+ connections. The phrase "I'm just not into you" comes to mind. In the privacy controls, you can designate that you place higher priority on information from certain users and lower priority from other users, but the filters aren't as effective as they need to become as Facebook grows.

Related:

• 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know
• Why Facebook Is For Old Fogies

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• Facebook Becomes Dominant Social Networking Portal
• Downsides of Facebook
• Social Media, Social Networks, Online Neighborhoods and Electronic Democracy Blog

 

Podcast (Audio Download) on Parents, Kids Using Webcams To Stay Close When They Live Apart

I recently participated in an online radio show about virtual visitation -- parents using a webcam with kids -- in the case of divorce, with Lee Rosen, a divorce lawyer in Raleigh, NC, and Michael Gough, a pioneering father on a mission to educate more parents and family lawyers and judges about virtual visitation. He manages a website called www.internetvisitation.net. Details about the show and a download can be found here.

Voice Recognition Software Improves, But to Use It Well Is a Lot of Work

Rob Pegoraro: "Speech-dictation software has advanced immensely over the past decade, but it's still not like talking to the Starship Enterprise's computer or a human stenographer." More.

'Twitter' Gains Steam

hrheingold " I now have nothing to say when my daughter calls, since she knows all my news via Twitter. Maybe we can sing on the phone."

"The latest innovation in online social networking is here, and it has a funny name," writes Brian Dukes in the Fayetteville Observer. "Meet Twitter, a free service that provides near-instantaneous contact with friends, family members and co-workers. The service begs its users to answer the question: “What are you doing?”

Gwen Sutton, a 53-year-old insurance agent, was introduced to Twitter by her son, Wayne Sutton, who lives in Raleigh.“Old folks twitter, too,” Sutton said, “and not just for fun.”

Sutton said she sees Twitter’s benefits carrying over into business networking. She has used Twitter to increase her personal and professional contacts, as well as to keep in touch with Wayne and her daughter, Janet.

“I’ve sent Wayne a tweet saying, ‘Wayne, call your mamma,’” Gwen Sutton said. “Twitter lets me instantly be able to get in touch with my kids.”

Having mom just a few keystrokes away is one of Twitter’s many benefits to Wayne Sutton, who has found social networking — and Twitter in particular — to be invaluable to his work. He is a community content manager for NBC 17 in Raleigh.

“Twitter has greatly impacted my network ability, my reputation and spread my brand all over the world,” Wayne Sutton said.

Wayne has approximately 6,000 followers — people who receive his tweets — on Twitter. By comparison, presidential candidate Barack Obama has 60,000.

“I’ve met more than 100 people through Twitter and established new relationships,” Wayne said. “But it takes hard work and time to build an audience. You need to listen first before you jump in and start posting.”

ScanMyPhotos.com: $50 for 1,000 Photos Scanned

Dave Pogue, New York Times: "If you, like millions before you, have a collection of prints somewhere, it’s probably crossed your mind that they really ought to be scanned — converted into digital files, both for protection and for ease of displaying. In that case, you, like millions before you, have probably even decided when you’ll do all that scanning: someday. Because let’s face it: scanning hundreds or thousands of photos yourself, one at a time, on a home scanner, is a time drain the size of the Grand Canyon. You could send them away to a company that does the scanning, but that’s incredibly expensive; most charge 50 cents or even $1 a photo. You’d be forgiven, then, for raising an eyebrow at the offer made by a California company called ScanMyPhotos.com. It says it will professionally scan 1,000 photos for you, the same day it receives them, and put them on a DVD for $50."

http://www.scanmyphotos.com/

I Was There. Just Ask Photoshop

New York Times: "As image-editing software grows in sophistication and ubiquity, alterations go far beyond removing red-eye and whitening teeth. They include substituting head shots to achieve the best combination of smiles, deleting problematic personalities or adding family members who were unable to attend important events, performing virtual liposuction or hair restoration, even reanimating the dead. Revisionist history, it seems, can be practiced by just about anyone.

"As people fiddle with the photos in their scrapbooks, the tug of emotion and vanity can win out over the objective truth. And in some cases, it can even alter memories — Cousin Andy was at the wedding, right? In an age of digital manipulation, many people believe that snapshots and family photos need no longer stand as a definitive record of what was, but instead, of what they wish it was." Read the whole thing.

The article mentions the blog, Photoshop Disasters.