Difficulty with privacy
research
Since privacy is
an important topic in an emerging media, a lot of studies on new media have
tried to relate their study to privacy. The owners of emerging media, however,
also have a huge concern for their user privacy. Usually, academic papers come
later than magazines or articles that study new technology or phenomenon
because of it publication process. The publication process may take up to
almost a year for an academic article to go through a peer review and to have it
revised. This may not have caused a lot of trouble in the past with traditional
media research, but it has now become a sort of a barrier for the new media
research because of its rapidly changing nature.
A few months
ago, a professor showed me a paper he was working on about privacy on Facebook.
It had only been a couple of years since he collected data, but I could tell
the data was already outdated because Facebook already changed a lot of
features regarding privacy. Now Facebook users can place their friends in
different groups that a user can modify a level of privacy. Users can separate
their family members, teachers, professors, or people from work by creating a
group for them, and putting their close friends in a different group. Users can
modify each post to be visible or invisible to a certain group. Through a bit
of modification, now people can make connections on the Facebook with fewer
worries for privacy. However, was this change included in the research the
professor was working on, which hasn’t been published yet? No. The years of
work and collected data have become archaic even before it was published. Even
Danah boyd’s work, which was published only a few years ago doesn’t capture
this change. The fast changing nature of new media makes it harder for
researchers to publish their observation and analysis. May be its time for new
media research journals to consider modifying their publication process.
Bullying and privacy
Cyber bullying
is significantly intertwined with privacy. It is difficult for adults to figure
out bullying problem because of the unique culture teens have. Teens use slang,
and sometimes what doesn’t seem embarrassing to adults’ eyes might cause a
severe trouble to some teenagers. Slangs are made for privacy purposes. With
the help of new media, such as inviting certain people into a group and keeping
others out, teen privacy is stronger as before. Dana boyd and some researchers
argued teen privacy has become weaker than before. But in fact, they are
actually adopting new media quicker than adults and are doing a good job in
protecting their culture confidential. Unlike before when parents could open up
a drawer to find their teenaged children’s secrets, now it is locked and
protected by passwords. Some SNS provide anonymity. Cyber bullying can become
way worse with anonymity, and users may post malicious comments about anyone.
It would be interesting to compare severity of cyber bullying in media that
provide anonymous feature and ones that doesn't to see anonymity produces
courage to post hate speeches. (It would it easy to collect data from Twitter,
but there will be some limitations for SNS such as Facebook, where stronger
privacy settings take place.)
Additional things to think about privacy
Another perspective of looking at teen privacy is regarding parents. Now
that people of all age are using Facebook, parents and grandparents post a lot
of things regarding their family. Some parents post pictures of their child
without the child’s consent. It can be an embarrassing picture for the kids,
especially when they are trying to create a certain persona to get an approval
of their peer group. Sometimes, a picture a parent has uploaded on a web
becomes popular after some unknown user creates it into a meme. Parents think
they have right to post picture of their babies, but it could be a violation of
the child’s portrait right. Regarding this matter, there should be a discussion on privacy
concern within family members.
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