Better safe than sorry

“That depends entirely on who is using them.” This was my fifteen-year-old daughter’s prompt reply when I asked her whether social media were a blessing or a curse.

Nowadays, many people take social media like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and MySpace for granted as commodities of daily life. Without giving any thought to their possible disadvantages or even dangers. For someone like me who grew up in a world without computers and has gone to great lengths to acquire basic computer skills, there’ll always be a certain amount of reservation about digital media.

The use of social platforms is one of the favourite pastimes of children and teenagers (but increasingly of adults as well). Since its launch in 2004, Facebook has been an unprecedented success story. According to Facebook statistics, the social platform has more than 500 million users creating more than 90 billion pieces of content like blog posts, photos, and web links every month. These numbers are beyond imagination. Nowadays, there’s considerable peer pressure to have a Facebook account, and children as well as teenagers might be enticed into sharing more information and giving more outspoken comments than seems prudent.

With a large family like mine – my husband and children, my siblings and their families adding up to nearly fifty people scattered to the four winds – a platform like Facebook undoubtedly has its advantages. It offers an easy and inexpensive way of staying connected and keeping everyone up to date without having to contact every single one of them separately. For my best friend Christine, bedridden due to multiple sclerosis, media like Facebook are a connection to an outside world that is otherwise nearly impossible for her to reach.

That’s the good news. The bad news is: knowledge is power. Despite all their protestations to the contrary, I just don’t buy that companies like Facebook can resist the temptation to sell the colossal amounts of data amassing worldwide for data mining and data profiling. Or do the data mining and data profiling themselves. As a matter of fact, we already leave enough digital traces with our telephones, bank and credit card accounts, internet activities, loyalty cards, and so on and so forth. And on top of that, we volunteer loads of private information, outspoken comments and explicit photos on platforms like Facebook.

We might even be jeopardising our careers. My son-in-law studied digital media and specialises in social media. He confirms that there are ways for prospective employers to get hold of Facebook information on job applicants. Digging up digital information on employees might even become standard operating procedure. (Perhaps it already is.) For some users of Facebook or other social platforms, this might be bad news. Using the internet, we should always be aware of the fact that nothing on the internet is totally private. Even if we delete rash comments or embarrassing photos, there’ll always be traces of them in the bottomless depths of the World Wide Web.

Better safe than sorry. With regard to social media, I think it’s best to go for a happy medium and consider beforehand what kind of insights into my private life I’m prepared to give – and where I definitely want to draw the line. And parents should really keep a watchful eye on their children’s internet activities. So we can enjoy the advantages of social media without being sorry later. My daughter’s probably right. Whether social media are a blessing or a curse depends – for the most part – on who uses them and how.