Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Friending your boss



Haven’t had too much to write about lately: partly due to a lack of inspiration and partly due to the bulk of my time outside of dating and work (my “me time”) has been spent on Warhammer & 40K and trying to get stuff squared away and be prepared for the Dark Heresy game I started running two weeks ago. In layman’s terms – my writing time has been shoved to the side in favor of nerding out.

However, some things did strike me this morning as noteworthy and worth scrawling a bit of a rant about. In the ‘that’s interesting’ department there is an article about seals & dolphins used in homeland security drills. However, I don’t want to get on my soap box about that right now for the devaluing of human life that I feel the last part of the article seems to show. In international news It seems investigators have conclusively found evidence of torpedoes being the cause of the sinking of the South Korean Corvette Cheonan back in late March. Also the riots in Thailand keep getting more and more out of hand and it seems just a few poorly handled incidents away from a full-blown civil war. However, I don’t feel like handling anything that serious right now. So instead something that has been popping up more and more lately I thought I would touch on – something a little more domestic and without the likelihood that people will get shot in the head over it.

Some co workers recently complained that their company had started a facebook page, and had started requiring them to ‘friend’ them. This is a phenomenon that seems to be swiftly spreading and has raised some very interesting conversations in how this relates to free speech and social networking sites. I even made an aside comment on it and got one of the longest and most impassioned series of comment replies I have so far seen on Facebook. (Please note – I didn’t get consent to post this, so all parties have been given cunning cover-names and pictures, everything else has been left in there for purposes of leaving the full context of the conversation.)


There are plenty of articles out there too. Some covering the implications from a privacy rights stand point and how it affects the social dynamic at work (New York Times). Others take a look at it from the perspective of employers and the liabilities it can create (Hubpages). I found more then a few that tackled it from a managerial stand point – most giving mixed results of why its good/bad (MonsterThinking)

To avoid going on a bit of a rant that re iterates a lot of the aforementioned articles cover and continue the beating of a dead horse – I will just throw my two cents out there and just leave this issue be.

I’ve been rolling it over in my head – and while the arguments in favor of an employer coercing employees to join groups or ‘friend’ them have their points: I feel it is in violation of the privacy rights of those employees. More importantly, I think it is contrary to the goal of what Facebook as a “Social-networking utility” is trying to become.

In a mission-statement I found for Facebook - "Facebook's mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected." (Found in an article on the Observer)

So far this seems to have primarily taken the form of people tagging one another in drunken photos. However, it has also shown great potential in connecting people through common concerns worldwide and locally. It also allows people to stay in touch with old friends or family that they otherwise may have completely lost track of, or even forgot about. Quite a few people I knew or were close to in my not-that-long past I have been able to find and reconnect from the opposite side of the globe in some cases.

The part that I keep coming back to is the last part of the mission statement “…make the world more open and connected.” Having your boss peaking over your shoulder as one more needless precaution in our overly nanny-ified society is just one more step back from that. While many postings may seem trite in the grand scheme of things (IE – “Can’t wait till Friday”, “Hate it when the barista gets my coffee wrong”, “Chem class today sucked, FML”, “Will someone plz water my plants in Farmville!!!!?????) without this thought-fodder fertilizing the soil of facebook, the truly prolific will be less likely to grow. If people are constantly afraid they might lose their jobs over one poorly worded post, or are having to wonder what ‘Big Brother’ thinks of what they have to say, they may not say something when they have something truly interesting to say.

All that is the complete opposite of keeping people open and connected…

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