Facebook is turning into a monster

I am pleased to find the Police Blotter in the paper this year. Hopefully Cal Poly will become a safer campus as students are informed of what dangers really do exist.

I was horrified on Tuesday to read about the sexual battery on Sept. 20 in the dorms. Specifically, the role that facebook played in the event causes alarm. (It was through facebook that the perpetrator met and contacted the victim.) For all we know, the perpetrator could have had ill-intent all along and used facebook to find and stalk the victim. We are not as careful as we should be with facebook and we need to rethink our love of online social networking.

I tried to be cautious; I used the security settings, but still facebook has become a monster. My profile contains a detailed record of my life for the past two years: who my friends are, where I’ve been. If I make a new facebook friend now, they have access to the hundreds of postings on my wall from the last two years. My notes and status updates even reveal my moods and seasons of life. It starts small, but over time our facebook profiles become online extensions of our very identities. Except they are far from accurate. Here lies the most dangerous problem: You can not make a proper judgment of someone’s character or personality based solely on their facebook profile, yet we often do so anyway. Even if it is unconscious, viewing someone’s facebook profile shapes our attitudes about that person.

We don’t realize how big the distinction is between who we really are as people and who our facebook profiles portray us to be. As much as facebook masquerades as reality, it is actually a fantasy. And when this fantasy so closely mirrors our realities, the results can be dangerous. And we, Cal Poly, have experienced some of the worst of these results here on our campus. Don’t let facebook deceive you into thinking it is something that it is not. If you have not developed a personalized privacy policy for your social networking profiles, as well as how you use those media, then you are putting yourself at risk.