Social media gains importance in the workplace every day, with companies following their employees’ blogs very closely and many organizations having their own official ones. For the last ten years, many people have lost their jobs because of what they have said on their personal blogs about their employers (see Murphy, 2006). It seems clear that HR takes this social media very seriously. Most big companies, like IBM, already have written policies on what is acceptable to say in personal as well as official blogs, whereas others choose not to limit bloggers, since any kind of blogpost can ultimately turn into publicity for the company, as Murphy mentions in her article, talking specifically about Microsoft.

The effect social media can have nowadays is massive. In dangerous countries where police are nonexistent or useless, people use social media to share information about difficult situations and help others in distress. Last year, when violence in Mexico reached unprecedented heights, I could see through Facebook how family and friends advised each other on a regular basis on which roads not to take because of police raids or which areas to avoid because of shootings happening at that precise moment. Sadly, we often see families sending pictures of kidnapped people through Facebook and email, in hopes of getting information on their whereabouts. Such postings have supposedly been useful in the past.

How we relate to others is undoubtedly changing, and social media is establishing a new kind of freedom, whether allowing us to raise our voice against our bosses, or connecting to our close ones in the midst of danger. Quoting Lewis Carroll again: “What a strange world we live in”. These are certainly strange times. I guess the only certain thing is that if social media has such power and influence it’s great to be able to use it for such significant things as saving lives in Mexico.

Murphy, Claire. Personnel Today, Mar 21, 2006: 26-27

http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/docview/229944834

Although I rarely use my Twitter account, I have read some very interesting stories about Twitter and its massive influence on current events. Just a few months ago, when the presidential campaign in Mexico was at a peak, the strongest candidate’s daughter exchanged some tweets with her boyfriend in which they belittled the Mexican people for having fun at her father’s expense after what had happened to him at the Guadalajara International Book Fair. Here’s what she wrote: “Greetings to all those imbeciles, to all those poor little people, who only criticize those who they envy”.

It definitely didn’t help the candidate’s image, already badly hurt after his Guadalajara Book Fair experience. What happened in Guadalajara was this:  when the press had asked him what his favourite books were, he went totally blank and couldn’t remember any book or author (not even one). After a few minutes of shamefully stuttering and getting tangled up in his answer, he remembered one book: the Bible, and tried very hard to make it look as if he had read it. And note: this happened at a Book Fair!

In a desperate attempt to fix what the candidate’s daughter had done, her Tweeter account was immediately closed, only to be reactivated later that day, when “the girl” posted an apology. It was obvious that it was the candidate’s entourage who wrote that apology because that was the first time the daughter posted anything with good grammar and spelling. Now that her father is Mexico’s president, she’s probably learning to keep her thoughts to herself.

I remember a different case where Twitter was a big component in a scandal: last year, a Peruvian author called Bryce Echenique was awarded with a very important literary prize in Mexico (by the way, this also happened in that memorable Guadalajara Book Fair). Since he has been accused of plagiarism many times in the last few years, there was an uproar in Spanish literary circles, and many people used Twitter to accuse the jurors of favouring Bryce Echenique as payoff for previous “gifts” (authors helping each other in exchange for publishing deals, etc.).

Twitter can definitely be an interesting place.

While I try to get into this new habit of writing a blog, I cannot stop thinking about an article I read last year when doing research for Lisa Nathan’s class (501). It was written by Chris Sorensen and published in Maclean’s in August 2012; the article was entitled “The Secret Internet”, and it was about “behavioural tracking”, a mechanism used by companies with an Internet presence to target consumers with personalized ads. I don’t know if it’s just me, but lately my Facebook page is completely full with ads. I have tried to change my settings, but it hasn’t worked, so I just gave up. Since I don’t use Facebook that much, I guess I can live with that.

According to Sorensen’s article, tracking consumer behaviour online is possible through the use of tiny pieces of code, or cookies, that are installed on our computers whenever we visit certain websites. Companies use our personal information (like geographic location, our interests shown on what we have seen online, and inferences about age, income and marital status) to automatically change what we can see, including online stores’ prices, which means that people with higher incomes would see higher prices than other users. I haven’t really checked—and I guess I should, at least out of curiosity—if the ads I see on Facebook have any relation to my online activity.

Advocators of behavioural tracking―most of them on the industry side of things―say that this practice ensures advertisers more web visits and a chance of extra sales, while web surfers can find services and products that suit them better, improving their overall experience on the web. Privacy advocators, though, are raising their voices against the abuses which may arise because of this unregulated and covert practice. Our race, our finances, our health can be tracked and used by companies for economic gain, and “price discrimination” could be on the rise. With companies like Orbits.com admitting having offered Mac users pricier hotels because, according to some statistics, they have higher incomes, a general concern seems warranted.

It’s funny how, whatever we do and whoever we are, big companies seem to be waiting, as crows perched on a branch, to get any crumbs we might leave on our way. And with crumbs I obviously mean money. What else could they want from us?

Before creating this blog, I looked for some information on blogging and found a very interesting infographic by Blogging.org titled the State of the Blogging World in 2012. According to the graphic, there are about 31 million bloggers in the US alone, 43% of bloggers use WordPress as their blogging platform and 35% use Blogger, and 60% of businesses have a company blog. Personal blogging is not about the money: Only 8% of bloggers earn enough money with their blogs to support a family. In the blogging world, English is the first language: 66% of blogs are in English, followed 8.7% in Spanish.

I really liked Andrew Sullivan’s quote, posted by Dean in Module I, about blogging being “to writing what extreme sports are to athletics:… less formal, more alive”; “writing out loud” he called it. Although I loved that concept of blogging and I can understand Sullivan’s sentiment to some extent, it’s hard for me to engage in the same way. I enjoy reading other people’s blogs, but I don’t like publicly sharing my own thoughts; I prefer face-to-face conversation, small gatherings where you can talk about anything you want because you know your “audience”. When it comes to blogs, I like the idea of being backstage watching other people having strong discussions online, but I really wouldn’t want to get involved. I guess it can be exhilarating to have people you’ve never met commenting on something you said, feeling that you have created a wave of energy and activity with your ideas (even having some “likes” on Facebook is sometimes exciting), but I can only imagine the shock of getting a bad comment to something you posted online for everyone to see. I think I would be tossing and turning all night after such a thing, thinking about what I wrote and regretting the public display for many months to come!