Facebook journalism, continued

Posted on | June 16, 2008 |

The recent post about Rudd’s social networking strategy is now available over at Online Opinion. Since I wrote the piece there have been some pretty spectacular examples of Facebook journalism–the most notable being The Courier Mail’s massive headline last Saturday, June 7: “FACEBOOK MURDER”. The web version of the story includes a link to the dead victim’s MySpace page that I won’t be directing people to from here, but is still live if you’re into that kind of thing.

In the same week I was interviewed at length by the Sunday Mail for a story about Facebook groups, although by comparison this was a positive experience since they also ran an additional story about how people are using communication technologies for efficiency reasons at work.

Still, there is a problem in the way that these publications continue to foster sensationalism about the ‘weird wild web’. Elsewhere I’ve noticed that the binge-drinking panic has also been linked to Facebook, i.e. it is kids putting glamorous photos of themselves getting trolleyed online that normalises such behaviour and avoids any discussion of the after-effects. In this story it is unclear from the last para of Ann Roche’s quote whether she is talking about kids (’they post photos’) or herself (’of our own drinking moments’)– a grammatical slip that seems telling.

Meanwhile today’s story about the online database for Queensland school children had the Education Minister reassuring parents that ‘it wasn’t like Facebook’–meaning that it wasn’t a threat to their privacy. This shorthand equation, Facebook = threat, is understandable in a context where the mainstream press seems bent on trawling profile pages and quite possibly their contacts for story content. But it doesn’t help to explain to parents that both Facebook and the intranet database being proposed have privacy controls embedded. Indeed the motivated hacking that would be required to break into a system of the kind being described is ironically only likely to pose enough interest and challenge for those with the skills to be bothered to do so now that parents have expressed such concern over it.

The real issue is whether a centralised computer database poses any more threat to a child’s personal information than filed hardcopies of the same information, or even locally saved electronic copies that can just as easily be distributed online by people with malicious intent. These genuine anxieties about surveillance and lack of consultation are certainly valid but they need to be framed within a wider conversation about the many ways that personal information is stored without notification, let alone approval–and not just when it affects kids.

Computer literacy and online participation is now being demanded from all of us in all kinds of educational, consumer and citizenly domains. To move beyond this impasse, where utilitarianism and convenience are pitched against paranoia and privacy, we need a conversation about the benefits of online records and archiving, whether it is of a public or personal nature. It is easy to see Facebook as simply a photo repository when your business is filling pages with colourful content or providing uncomplicated soundbites. But if you are part of online culture and have enjoyed some of its benefits you will also appreciate that like many other web based communities, Facebook reflects the rhythms and priorities of Monday morning as much as of Saturday night.

Let’s stop exaggerating what happens online when networked computers are such a major part of everyday life in our much vaunted ‘information economy’. And anyone who is writing about the ethics of Facebook journalism, or with tales to tell of what’s happening in newsrooms, please do get in touch.

Category: Research, Web(log) Stuff

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