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