digital footprint

[Becky]

Since the conference, I've generally been thinking about privacy and digital footprints. (You may have seen the Pew study about this that was recently released.)

What I'm wondering is weather the basic idea of one's online identity and self disclosure should be addressed by teachers and/or librarians in terms of critical thinking. Ought we to encourage students to investigate and more critically assess the online communities they join to determine what (identity and other) information they should give?

Perhaps it's inaccurate, but I sort of think of an analogy: a teenager wouldn't wear the same clothes to prom that they would to work or the gym. I'm not sure they have this same sense of propriety online.

At any rate, just musing. I'd be interested in input.

[Dave Collins]

Thanks for sharing the summary of the report. I found it interesting that just 55% of teens said they had created an online profile, and of those less than half left their profiles wide open. I think the stereotype has been more like all teens are doing this. Perhaps this gives us an opening on the instruction/critical thinking side to work with students to create online profiles that will enable them to showcase their scholarship.

We are doing a lot as far as putting student honors papers and other student scholarship into library-created repositories, but how much are we encouraging students to link back in to their own content?

Final thought--I'm curious about the relationship between MySpace and Facebook. My impression is that Facebook is more college student oriented. However, many incoming college students probably have MySpace accounts they have been using for a few years. Will they end up dropping one, adding one, keeping both? I wonder if there is any info on trends in this area.

[Scott Spicer]

Hi Dave. Regarding your last question, I have been intrigued by this question as well, so I did a little research into the topic. While I was unable to find empirical data suggesting teenagers specific migration behavior on social networking when they enter college, Time had an article last year, suggesting that students are indeed using both sites simultaneously (http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1675244,00.html). While Facebook is still more college oriented; since they began allowing public access two years ago to users without a high school/college affiliation, their membership/visitor numbers have skyrocketed. In fact, in May, Facebook actually overtook MySpace internationally in unique visitors (http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Facebook-is-beating-MySpa...) though MySpace is still more popular in the US.

As an aside, outside of the academic realm there are a number of really interesting articles and blog posts that discuss further the relationship of class dynamics and membership to each.

Finally, these communities are so fickle, I find it incredible that these two sites have been able to stay at the top for this long! In the end, I am curious what impact new initiatives like Facebook Connect and MySpace Data Availability (user sharing software with other social networks) will have on user preferences and whether they will move us closer to the kind of social operating system discussed by the NMC folks?