When must-use meets must-block

 

Chris Dawson has a post up at ZDNet Education discussing how to reconcile the cultural prominence of social networking sites (and clearly compelling business use-cases thereof) with the standing practice of blocking access to these sites in many workplaces and schools:

...if Facebook is truly becoming a “must-use” application, where does that leave our students, teachers, and staff who sit behind content filters where Facebook is blocked? There aren’t many of us who allow the social network past our filters, but are we cutting off legitimate communication?

Obviously we’re cutting off plenty of plain old socializing that has no place in schools. We’re cutting off the potential for cyber-bullying, cheating, and plenty of other illegitimate uses. However, if this is the medium of choice for parents and the vast majority of people who use computers in our schools, are we doing a disservice by blocking it?

I don’t think so, since most of us allow access to email and even custom internal social networks. However, every time I see new evidence that social media in general (and Facebook in particular) is becoming the dominant means of communication in our culture, I can’t help but wonder if our content filtering needs to be a bit more enlightened.

My guess is "yes." But it might take a couple of years. When I was in high school (and we're talking not quite a decade ago), schools were still attempting to block access to most of the Internet, including news sites, blogs and email. Cell phones were prohibited (PROHIBITED, in capitals!) inside school buildings. The thought that any of these things could contribute meaningfully to education - or to life at school - was met with serious skepticism, and the suggestion that a high school should have its own email system or online publishing platform was viewed as a bit unrealistically forward-thinking. I predict that a decade from now, discussions about blocking access to Facebook in schools and workplaces will seem similarly misguided.

Dawson does have a point: giving students access to Facebook in school provides opportunities for bullying, cheating, and possibly distracting non-academic discussions. But, unless I'm missing something, aren't these activities already happening in schools, and already accounted for in existing codes of conduct? Do school officials think that the only thing currently keeping students in line is their lack of access to Facebook?

Technology happens, the world changes, and organizations need to be ready to adapt their policies and enforcement methods accordingly. It will happen. It's just a matter of how much time you want to spend fighting it.

Stop tagging me, Dad!

This post was originally published on PR Nonsense, for March Communications.

The statistics Nate reflected on earlier this week should come as no surprise to those of us in our mid-twenties who have found ourselves, of late, frantically untagging Facebook photos posted by our parents in which we look unspeakably hideous and embarrassing. Yes, it’s inescapable – “old people” are on Facebook now. Related discussion of the generation gap among Facebook users (and reactions from some “old people” themselves!) has been ongoing this week at The XX Factor.

My own Facebook nightmare arrived late in the game... it was barely two months ago that I suggested to my father, jokingly, that he should be on Facebook. My fiancé’s parents are on Facebook, I explained, and it’s adorable! His immediate reaction was begrudging consideration. “I just don’t know what I would use it for.”

Within two hours my dad had posted his first Facebook photo album: Fish I Have Killed, the contents of which are exactly what you’re imagining. Within 24 hours my stepmom had a Facebook account, then my two aunts, then a variety of my parents’ friends and neighbors, all posting on each other’s walls with wild joy and abandon... and intense frequency.

Then came the mortification. Photo albums filled with family pictures of me at my most awkward, worst-dressed, and ill-maintained – all several years old and now at the top of Facebook’s “Photos of Me,” flouting proper chronology and pushing more current, flattering photos down the queue, provoking both my vanity and obsessive-compulsion in one fell swoop! Come ON, Dad!

In fact, the whole thing’s still kind of cute. But it does demonstrate a permeating fact of the social web age: it is becoming less and less realistic to break your public image into facets for each audience, and to hold back artifacts inconsistent with your desired branding. The answer, again, is to stop scrambling for control and start building. Identity is a constructive process, and the only way you can come close to controlling yours is to be the primary purveyor of content about you. Especially now that your Dad and all those fish are on Facebook.