You can call it a cultural difference or maybe just immaturity, but when I arrived at Pacific Lutheran University last August, I did not think too much about what was on my Facebook account, such as posts and pictures, and I did not even have a LinkedIn account. I still don't have a Twitter.
It took me less than a month to discover that things are done differently over here. All of my professors urged me to be on LinkedIn and create a professional network, as well as to clean up my Facebook account to make it professional and presentable. Though I still need to improve my LinkedIn account - I still do not have a profile picture - I now have what I consider to be a decent network, and I have nothing on my Facebook account that would reflect poorly on me.
However, I have more than 900 Facebook friends including family, friends, classmates, Europeans, Americans, religious, non-religious etc. What I say and do might be interpreted in one way by one group and in another way by another group. Having your voice heard is not only about “getting heard,” it is just as much about what you say. I for one, have realized that my actions affect what people think of me and I better make sure that ALL my different groups of friends, across nationalities, cultures and beliefs, see me as I am – and I can only do that by thinking before doing.
I will leave you with a summary of a blog post I read the other day. A study of 58,000 American Facebook users showed, that your Facebook “likes” can determine your religious and political views. So do not only think about what pictures you have on your account or what you post about, but even your “likes” is a part of your voice.
And if you can read Norwegian, this is the article the blog is based on.
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Nice cross-post of one of the other student blogs! Yes, I agree that this can become more challenging the larger the network grows on Facebook. I think for that reason it's a good idea that Facebook started to create separate networks with different privacy options, e.g. close friends see more of your content vs someone marked as acquaintance. I guess Facebook learned from Google+ in that regard.
ReplyDeleteI am a huge fan of separate networks. Though some will simply argue that using separate networks means you have something to hide from others, I will claim, as stated in the post, that culture can make a huge difference on how an update etc. can be interpreted.
DeleteSome things that I can say to my Danish friends would be unacceptable in the U.S. and vice versa.
And when you have friends and family in several different countries it can be nice sometimes to split them into groups.