On Living Transparently
This week I ran into two professors who began talking about their use of Facebook, and it’s caused me to do some thinking about my own use of Facebook, blogs, and the web in general.
One prof said that she didn’t want to friend students until they’d graduated, because she saw Facebook as a private place for her friends and family to share — she didn’t want students seeing her family photos and being privy to her innermost thoughts. The other prof said he uses Facebook to interact with his teaching-credential students, but he warns those students that K-12 school districts will review prospective teachers’ Facebook pages and often have rules about teachers’ Facebook use.
In response to my Facebook status line Dru is reading/thinking about profs on Facebook — should we not Friend our students? – but prefers to live a transparent life, several university-affiliated friends pointed to various online articles and resources, such as the Faculty Ethics on Facebook group. Its guidelines boil down to (1) don’t use Facebook for any kind of formal/mandatory coursework; (2) if you intend to friend students at all, let them ask you first, and friend any students who ask; and (3) exercise discretion in what you do there. A quick Google on faculty, ethics, Facebook will turn up all sorts of articles about the benefits and drawbacks to professors using this social networking site. Quite a few professors, contrary to the Faculty Ethics on Facebook recommendations, say they use the site in positive ways as part of their classes.
Somewhat to my relief — although certainly unintentionally — I seem to be in compliance with the Faculty Ethics group’s guidelines, except possibly #6, “Faculty members should avoid association with Facebook groups with explicit sexual content or views that might offend or compromise the student / teacher relationship…,” because I joined the Got Yaoi? Facebook group in order to post my Call for Papers and generally make myself accessible to boys’ love fans. I’m going to excuse that on the grounds that I study the genre and, as far as I’ve seen, the group’s discussion doesn’t include explicit sexual content. My belonging to the group could offend some of my students, suggesting as it does that I find nothing wrong with male/male relationships. But then again, so could the university-approved “Safe Space” sticker on my office door, which also implies my acceptance of GLBTI lifestyles and cultural diversity in general. Some kinds of people, I just can’t worry about offending.
But what’s interesting about many of the articles about faculty use of Facebook is that they concern themselves with faculty prying into students’ lives, whereas my friend was concerned about students prying into her life. What about that side of the equation? Should faculty friend students at all?
I accept Facebook friend requests all the time — even when I don’t know the person asking. Why? Because my Facebook page not only represents me as myself to friends and old schoolmates, it represents me as the author of Clockwork Heart and various short stories, as the editor-in-chief of The Harrow and owner of The Harrow Press, as a boys’ love researcher and co-editor of an upcoming volume of scholarship on BL, and as a professor of communication at California Lutheran University. I want to make myself accessible not only to people I already know but also to people it might be interesting to get to know — readers, authors, other BL scholars and fans, etc.
Of course, because I’m so indiscriminate in whom I friend, I make careful choices about what to post and what not to post on Facebook; just as I do here. I do post status updates about my feelings or experiences on Facebook — that I’m tired, that I can’t concentrate, that I’m thinking about moving, that I’m enthusiastic about something. Why not? I’m human, after all, and I’m not afraid of my students knowing that. Nevertheless, I’m cognizant of my potential status as an authority figure/role model for my students — though I kinda pity ‘em if I’m the best they can do along those lines! — so I try to keep the worst of my whining, whimpering, and worrying confined to my private blog, shared with friends and family but not advertised to the public.
So what did my status line mean when I wrote that I prefer to live transparently? It meant I do my utmost to live as though every facet of my life were open to public scrutiny. Sure, as a reader/writer, I appreciate those tormented antiheroes with deep, dark secrets and those wary countercultural icons living double, if not triple, lives. But as a person, I find it much easier to be open and consistent. I don’t keep any deep, dark secrets and I don’t pursue any clandestine activities. Sometimes I kinda regret that — I feel terribly boring. But on the other hand, I never need struggle to keep my lies straight; I never worry about what my family might find in the back of my closet if I dropped dead unexpectedly; I never fret about what my employing institution might discover if it decides to read all my archived email or track my blogging. (In fact, several coworkers will get a web alert about this blog entry because it contains the phrase “California Lutheran University” — hi, everyone! Log in and comment about internet privacy and/or Facebook use here. Do you consider using web alerts an invasion of privacy, or caveat scriptor?)
In some ways, living transparently puts me in a vulnerable position — I open myself to the public criticism of my ideas, to the condemnation of my web use and hobbies, and even, potentially, to the theft of my identity. But in other ways it’s liberating — I simply assume people already know all about me and behave accordingly, which saves all kinds of effort, even though in reality very few people take the effort to look me up online. Besides, as one of my peers said when I commented to her about writing this blog post, “all someone has to do to steal my identity is take my purse!”
My ultimate attitude on internet privacy is that there is none. Being a savvy media consumer means understanding that whatever is disseminated through cyberspace is potentially public — web pages, blog posts, social networking information, email, text messages, forum messages, Amazon book reviews, whatever. And since Facebook reserves the right to collect information on its members not only from its own site but also from other media and the web at large*, and it lays claim to all user-provided content posted on its site**, I especially don’t think that anyone who values their privacy ought to join it — regardless of the purpose to which they intend to put their page.
As for me, if Facebook really wants to republish those photos of me in silly costumes, go for it. Just give me credit, okay?
Status Update: Dru apologies for verbing nouns like “friend” and “Google” in this article.
*See Facebook’s Privacy Policy, “The Information We Collect”: Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service (e.g., photo tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalized experience.
** See Facebook’s Terms of Service, “User Content Posted on the Site”: When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.
drupagliassotti @ November 21, 2008