Who is watching you?!
Thursday, October 15, 2009 by CC
On Sunday 20th September, the news showed a story about how Lincoln University students had a dress up party to celebrate Oktober Fest. As most youths do, pictures were taken as a result and posted up on Facebook. The students who dressed up as "German's" had no idea of the implications of their costumes and would have never taken into consider that the rest of New Zealand would be seeing them. On the TVNZ website ( http://tvnz.co.nz/national-news/student-s-nazi-party-causes-outrage-3000389 ) they retell the event as a nasty and unacceptable. Lincoln University Students Association president Megan Harte states, that the first year students had no idea that they were expressing racial tendencies.
This is a direct example of privacy in the digital age. In Boyd's article Facebook's Privacy Trainwreck, he uses an example of being in a crowd of all the people you know, when suddenly the music stops, and you are suddenly heard by them all. An embarrassment of course, as there are some things you do not wish say in front of others. Thus being the case for these Lincoln University students. 'Those data were all there before but were not efficiently accessible; they were not aggregated. The acoustics changed and the social faux pas was suddenly very visible.' (Boyd 2008)
No one is ever truly aware of their actions in a social network, your news is everyone news and now for Lincoln University, their downfalls are now there for everyone to see.
Try it, in the Google Search engine type 'Lincoln University' and see what you find out.