Monthly Archives: January 2013

Data Privacy Day

Posted on January 28, 2013 | 9 comments

Today is Data Privacy Day. It is held every year on January 28th.

Data Privacy Day is an effort to empower people to protect their privacy and control their digital footprint and escalate the protection of privacy and data as everyone’s priority.(National Cyber Security Alliance, 2013)

After spending the last two weeks thinking about how we participate in social media, Data Privacy Day seemed like a well placed punctuation mark. We read Pearson (2009) and her thoughts about our performance on social networking sites—suspended between the public and the private. We also discussed Albrechtslund (2008) and his ideas about online social networking and participatory surveillance practices—where surveillance can be mutual, empowering, and a sharing practice rather than a trade.

So what does this have to do with Data Privacy Day, you ask? By participating in the online world—whether it’s sharing photos on Facebook, buying something from Etsy, applying to a job through Workopolis or tweeting what you ate for breakfast—we are exposing varying degrees of information about ourselves. We create an online identity. Albrechtslund (2008) states that “to participate in online social networking is also about the act of sharing yourself – or your constructed identity – with others.” It is important to be conscious of just how much you are sharing, and be a “good steward of data” (National Cyber Security Alliance, 2013).

I think this is an important conversation to be had. I have witnessed many instances of thoughtless overshares on Facebook and Twitter. Of course there is lots of discussion about [insert social networking site here] is abusing our privacy, but we should also be talking about how we abuse our own privacy. I also think information professionals are poised to facilitate this discussion and can serve as a fount of knowledge. I have seen libraries that offer social media instruction (Facebook 101 and the like). How about online privacy 101?

The National Cyber Security Alliance has a wide range of resources for parents, teens and youth, educators, businesses, international resources, and just plain-old-everybody.

Albrechtslund, A. (2008). Online social networking as participatory surveillance. First Monday, 13(3). Retrieved from http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/2142/1949

National Cyber Security Alliance. (2013). About. Retrieved from http://www.staysafeonline.org/data-privacy-day/about/

Pearson, E. (2009). All the world wide web’s a stage: The persormance of identity in online social networks. First Monday, 14(3). Retrieved from http://www.firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2162/2127

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Affordances

Posted on January 19, 2013 | Leave a comment

We have moved on from affordances to participation, but I have been tossing around some ideas about the language of affordance. It began with a tweet and a reply:

Now, since blogger affords me a greater space for reflection as well as the opportunity to discuss with you, my dear reader, I decided to expand on my thoughts here rather than Twitter. The term affordance was first coined by James J. Gibson, an perceptual psychologist, as “an action possibility available in the environment to an individual, independent of the individual’s ability to perceive this possibility” (McGrenere, 2000, p. 1). The term was later used by Donald Norman in The Psychology of Everyday Things (now published as The Design of Everyday Things):

…the term affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used. A chair affords (‘is for’) support and, therefore, affords sitting. A chair can also be carried. (Norman in McGrenere, 2000, p. 2).

If we apply to this to a social networking site, such as Google+, we can say that it affords: connecting with people, sharing interesting links, images, thoughts with your ‘circles, and getting into arguments with other users via commenting. There are many affordances—some of them are positive (connecting with people) and some of them are negative (getting into arguments with strangers). Of course, some affordances can have both positive and negative impacts on your experience with the tool.

In my initial response on Twitter, I preferred the use of ‘affordances’ over ‘pros’ and ‘cons’ because of the flexibility of the former and the dichotomy of the latter. While I still think this is true, I don’t think the language of ‘pros’ and ‘cons’ is talking about the possible uses of tool in the same way as ‘affordances’. In my mind, we can assign pros and cons to the affordances. For example, in Twitter I can immediately share a picture of my new haircut with the my friends, family, and the world (pro), but I may also be ridiculed for how bad it is (con). Another example, I can post a comment on a friend’s wall (pro), but they don’t get my joke because it can be hard to read sarcasm and as a result are offended (con). A pro is an advantage of something and a con a disadvantage, and I see these terms applying to the affordances.

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Hello world!

Posted on January 3, 2013 | Leave a comment

Welcome to Feir Enough. This blog was created for LIBR 559M: Social Media for Information Professionals. I use social media on a day-to-day basis, but how much of this is in a professional capacity? The amount is negligible. At best, I am a passive observer of content created by other information professionals by way of blogs, listservs, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn—Facebook is reserved for sharing wedding photos with family members, RSVPing to events, and poking friends (that last one doesn’t actually happen).

I hope that through this class and through this blog, I will make the jump from consumer to contributor and producer of content regarding social media and information professionals and organizations.

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