Catalogue This: Managing Information in Social Media Applications
I was one of the first Canadians to have Facebook. Back in 2004 when Facebook was only open to post-secondary students, I was an undergraduate at McGill, the first Canadian institution to have Facebook access. I don’t say this as some sort of bragging point, but to illustrate the following: over 6 years of my life are, to a greater or lesser extent, documented on Facebook. Until a couple of days ago when I started to seriously consider what this meant, there were well over 1,200 pictures of me tagged on Facebook, and I had about 45 photo albums posted. In some cases, due to previous computer failure, these were the only copies of the photos that existed. Although I’ve decreased both of those numbers slightly over the past few days, that’s still a hefty number of photos to deal with. Don’t even get me started on messages, or even worse, wall posts.
So here’s the question: what are social media platforms doing (or not doing) to help users manage the information they’re creating in these online environments? While some do this well, some, including Facebook, aren’t doing enough. If you use Facebook a fair amount, you’ve probably, like me, spent far too long looking for that elusive photo or post. I don’t plan to get rid of my Facebook account in the near future, so I’ve started to seriously consider not only how I manage the way I’m presenting myself online, but how to manage the sheer volume of what I have out there.
This is an important consideration for information professionals. If we want to use these tools in a professional capacity, we need to think about how to manage the information we produce, or the information produced by others in relation to us. One of the significant things about producing information online (as authors like Erika Pearson and Anders Albrechtslund point out) is that it is often enduring. But the utility of this is drastically reduced if we can’t easily locate the things we need. The longer we have been using a specific tool, and the more we use that tool, both the significance of this need and the difficulty of accomplishing it are greatly increased.
Now, what can I do about all these Facebook photos?
Image: “My Social Network.” Flickr. http://www.flickr.com/photos/luc/1824234195
Hi Amy,
Six years of your life and 1,200 pictures is a lot of time on Facebook! I think you have every right to remove as many photos as you want and un-tag any you don’t want to share.
A recent story on NPR about Facebook pointed out the obvious fact (and one we all overlook) is that Facebook is the largest database of personal information (more than the government) and it’s all willingly supplied by the users. Imagine that? We all hand over all kinds of personal information to Facebook without even pausing. Facebook has so much power because of this and they’re trying to find as many ways as possible to capitalize on this. Which is why I think it’s really important that we take privacy very seriously when it comes to social media.
Good post, Amy. I thought I had a lot on Facebook. You’ve got me beat! Some third party applications for getting stuff out came into being during the spring’s Facebook backlash, but then you get a .txt file and none of your pictures. I’d like to see more applications with open file formats so you can easily get data in and out. Unfortunately, social media seems to be more of an in or out situation.
So, after reading your post, I went on FB and scrolled back through my wall about a year. I had never done that before and even though I knew it was technically possible, it still kind of astounded me to see all those posts and comments still there. I realized that FB has become the closest thing to a journal for me in the last few years.
When I was a kid, I religiously kept a diary. As an adult, I pretty regularly kept a journal. But strangely, my journaling petered out right about the same time I got active in FB. In fact, I don’t even keep actual photo albums anymore – FB is my photo album. All this makes me think there has got to be a good way to store and catalogue all of it, like you said. But I don’t know of any application that does that. The one John mentioned above sounds pretty unexciting.
Does anyone else know of such a program?
-Heidi
Great post, Amy. I’d never before considered the challenges of information retrieval from personal social networks – you’ve really opened my eyes to a whole world of cataloging possibilities. Hopefully, companies like Facebook will eventually, given enough user demand, begin to provide better ways to tag, organize, sort, and search your information. But how do we keep track of ALL our digital information – our photos in Flickr, our tweets, this blog, our emails, etc, etc.? Seems to me there is a need for a centralized database to control our personal information – a personal catalog, if you will. Sounds like a project for Google, to me!
Hey, Amy:
I’m incredibly impressed. I thought I was a pretty dedicated Facebook user, but now I feel pretty behind. I also wind up pretty frustrated when I try to go back and find an old post … it’s fascinating to track changes in friendships, etc., through Facebook, but scrolling back past a week or two of posts winds up being almost impossible (for me, the whole page will screw up, or I’ll accidentally lose all the progress I’ve made so far). I mostly dislike this for nostalgic reasons, but it is frightening to think of everything I’ve ever said being both inaccessible to me and possibly accessible to other users … really interesting post, I didn’t think about FB in that way before.