Monday, December 15, 2008

I've noticed something..

So I've got a Facebook.
Post on it regularly. Use it to keep in touch with friends and people I don't normally see.
Normal stuff like that.
But recently it's begun to be inhabited by adults, so I've seen. Just random adults you kinda-sorta-not-really-but-in-a-way know. For my specific instance, it's the people in my community from two distinctive groups- church and parents of friends.
I'm not trying to say I'm against adults getting Facebook pages. I don't mind being friends with these adults, even! But it's starting to really bother me.
And that's not just because one of the adults from my church is sending me event invites non-stop.
It's because I'm being watched.
I got a message from my youth leader to the youth group at my church saying that he doesn't want to see some of the stuff the youth posts up on their pages, because it's frowned upon. And even before this, my friends and I have had to really watch what we say, so we don't get grief from adults.
It's not that the aspect of it is an invasion of privacy, because I know it's not. Whatever you post on the Internet is your responsibility to do safely.
But what does bother me is that youth these days are having so much pressure on them to do whatever is socially accepted. Conformity? Not necessarily, but follows the same general track.
For example. No one is the absolute perfect Facebook/Myspace/Bebo/Twitter/whatever you implement user. I'm sure everyone has some perverted joke, some somewhat explicit song they listen to or movie they love, or curses a bit on their personal pages, right?
If you're looked down upon for something that you say or do and they find themselves...what image does that present?
Especially recently, people have really had dampers established.
I noticed this recently as well. I'm studying up on the Federal Communications Commission [or better known as the FCC] for a new style of debate I'm trying, and people are having more and more rights taken away for the most redundant reasons.
This really does apply here as well.
If your friends' parents are looking at your personal pages and saying "Oh, this person uses this language from time to time, this is bad." or something of that sort, honestly, whose fault is that?
We as Americans [and other countries as well, for sure] are granted the freedom of expression. More specifically, free speech.
This freedom does come with the responsibility of moderating what is posted and how it can affect your safety, of course, but the freedom is still granted.
I'm not even saying anything about personal information being put up for the world to see.
I'm only saying that sites like Facebook have turned into something so formal, so adult-moderated that...people really don't have freedoms anymore.
If you're having to hide things you say because you don't want people to overreact, what has this modern-day, so-called "advanced" society come to?

Maybe I'm just acting like a rebel teenager.
I don't know. I figured my reasoning was pretty valid.
As far as I'm concerned, no one should care what I post unless it's going to hurt my safety or confidentiality at its highest being a user.

/end rant.

1 comment:

Spencer said...

Yeah both my parents got facebooks and it is very annoying because they stalk me.