Faceless Friends

Since the internet first came about it has changed the way in which the world interacts and digital media has set in place new developments in social relationships.

Chat rooms have played an important role in the evolution of digital interpersonal communication. E-mail came first in 1972, then came USENET, an e-mail based newsgroup started in 1979. Newsgroups became bulletin boards and some bulletin board users wanted to interact with the group in real time instead of waiting to reply to an ongoing message thread. In the late '70s and early '80s, several small bulletin board communities incorporated chat and IM into their networks and so followed the faceless friend. With the invention of chatrooms came a shift in the social paradigm and assumption that you had to know someone to talk to them. Chatrooms allowed strangers to interract, innocently but anonnymously.

This was a huge change in the social paradigm and the idea of internet pals or faceless friends difficult to comprehend for some people. Not all chatroom communication was with strangers. MSN developed an IM service which enabled you to add your friends and reject those you didn’t know, however you could add random strangers if you wished.

With the number of chatrooms growing and the amount of people using them also increasing they started to become surrounded with bad press in regard to the dangers that the annonymity presented. Chatrooms supposedly became haunts for peadophiles and perverts and so without surprise their popularity decreased and it was something frowned upon.

Now chatrooms are virtually dead and social networking sites are now a big part of modern interraction. Facebook, Ebay, Windows Live Messenger and Google are the top 4 visited sites on the web (Neates, 2008) 3 of which are social sites with Facebook having over 500million users (Facebook. 2011).

With social networking growing and growing without anyone battering an eyelid is it really that different to chat rooms? In all fairness you can add or reject friends and identity is a big part of your social media profile but anonymity is still possible, so is interaction with strangers. They may not appear to be ‘faceless friends’ or as risky as talking to a username in a chat room but it’s quite easy to take on a fakeidentity.

The dangers of online communications are vast; hidden identities, cyber bullying, hacking into accounts etc. With online communication becoming a big part of social interaction the dangers shouldn’t be overlooked. Especially seeing as it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere…

The Age of Openness

With my generations fixation with online profiles, blogging, photo sharing and email, has our obsession with broadcasting ones self to the world resulted in a loss of respect for the privacy of others, as well as own? 

A status written by someone can often reveal some quite personal information. In reality, who really thinks about who is going to read the status when it is written.

I for one certainly forget that out of my 450 friends, I actually only talk to about 80 of them and when I write a status I only ever think about them reading it, not some boy from my primary schools sister who now lives in another country.

From the ‘limited’ Facebook profile of mine the minimum a stranger can find out is: my date of birth; what university I am at; where I am currently living; who I’m in a relationship with and my current profile picture. This amount information may seem normal but as a member of Facebook it is the minimal amount of information you can reveal. I can’t chose to reveal any less information which I personally find quite worrying.

Mark Zukerberg (for those of you who haven't seen 'the social network' he is the mastermind behind Facebook) stated that "openness is the new social norm".

This all sounds well and good and I’m sure it would put many a persons mind at ease with the thought ‘well if everyone is doing it…’ But that flippant attitude is with regard to what we know we are revealing.

Facebook as a company can access your information, which is quite obvious due to the fact you entering it onto their site. But many are unaware that if you fail to tick or untick certain boxes, which are hidden amongst a load of technical and notoriously complicated legal jargon, your information can be passed on to other sites and organisations.
Facebook cleverly changes its privacy settings regularly so that unless you chose to customize them, you will automatically be given the default settings which are convenient to them. The smart part of this is that this information will pop up when you log onto Facebook, and the majority of people simply cannot be bothered to spend the time changing these settings. People are therefore unknowingly giving away personal information and unwillingly loosing their privacy.

Search Engine Marketing: Has Yahoo Gone Too Far?

If you mention the term 'search engine' to someone the first thing that will pop into their head is the infamous Google which is used over 200 million times a day world wide.

The majority of people, myself included, wonder what on earth they would do without it. In my day to day life, if there is ever anything I want to know or do I will depend on   Google to find it. If not Google then it will be Yahoo!, Bing or Ask: the wonderful group of know-it-all websites that have created a world where no question goes unanswered and no image is out of reach and where knowledge is endless.

It is no surprise then that Google smartly created Adwords and Adsense: A form of ‘paid search advertising’ and now 40% of online advertising expenditure is spent on search advertising (Klassen, 2008). This works by advertising websites by the side of the natural results, Google separates them so that the user is aware of the natural results and the ones which have paid to be there.

Adwords (by Google, Yahoo! And Msn also have versions) is when advertisers choose a set of workds or phrases which relate to their product or which will positively associate with the brand. If such words are entered the website willl appear. The service is ‘pay-per-click’ so the advertiser will only pay when the service works. Adsense is different because it is contextually targeted.                                                                                             

Every time I enter a search in Google I rely on it to produce a vast amount of websites and possibilities but I very rarely click past the first ‘o’ and more often than not I will settle for the first 3 results. This is due to a multiple of reasons, one of them being that I’m too lazy to traipse through the thousands if not millions of results but mainly because I believe that the results on the first page are normally the most reliable genuine and closely linked to my request. Yahoo! Have now created a form of paid ‘search advertising’ which takes advantage of this trust and embeds its advertisements in with the search results giving the illusion that they were natural. In 2009 Google were thinking of using interest based advertisements which were specific to each user by gathering information from the users’ cookies.

Although both of these alternative methods of Search Engine Marketing may produce better results, are they fair? They do not ask the consent of the search engine users, are producing misleading results and are beginning to become an invasion of privacy.