Nov 30 2007
Facebook addiction or useful service?
I have been having great fun over the last couple of days getting to know Facebook. For ages, I just had a page with nothing on it, but the other night I was feeling a bit low and decided to play about with it. But then I got really into it, trying to find people that I know. At first I just looked for people that I work with, then I tried to find some friends from the past. However, the trouble is that maybe my old friends, as they are my age, are not really into all of this kind of stuff. But I did find some younger members of my family – which was great!
So… what to make of this interesting phenomenon? It poses quite a dilemma for a professional kind of person.
On the one hand, I could just have fun and put all kinds of silly apps on my page. And I have started doing this a bit.
But… I have read a lot about how employers are looking up people. They are not going to be impressed by some of the very silly things on some people’s pages.
So… I read in Cilip Update magazine today about Judi Sohn’s “12 Ways to Use Facebook Professionally“. I plan to read this and think some more about how I want to use Facebook.
I will post some more on here when I have thought some more.
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Sorry to join this discussion a bit late but its been a rather chaotic end of term! I too experimented with a page on Facebook but after I saw some of the things that kids at our school were saying about staff…I decided maybe it was just too much of a generational leap for me. It is a shame as I think it has tremendous potential for just the kind of professional uses you have identified. However, I have some real misgivings about the naivety of the kids in thinking that they can say basically quite dicey things about other people without having it come back to bite them at some point. We have already had several cases of Facebook bullying at school. But what most schools don’t realize is that if you contact Facebook about alledged bullying, they will pull the account of perpetrators. Another surprise for me was the images that some of the girls put up of themselves wearing some pretty minimal clothing. I think our school does a pretty good job of teaching online safety but still our girls don’t appear to think that they need to be more careful of what they publish online. So for the time being I shall be faceless and without ‘my space’….:-) But there are plenty of other aspects to Web 2.0 to become involved in!