Facebook and the Desire to be Known

The following two articles appeared in the last few weeks. This was around the same time as a bunch of students at a nearby high school were suspended or disciplined when their drunken pictures were found on Facebook.

Authorities make string of underage drinking arrests from Facebook photos
Monday, January 14, 2008 4:56 PM
Abc7Chicago.com By Leah Hope

LOMBARD, IL -- A group of suburban teenagers has been arrested for underage drinking, and authorities say they learned about the incident through the Web site Facebook.

See the full article here.

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Couple accused of allowing teen drinking
09:48 AM EST on Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Providence Journal By C. Eugene Emery Jr.

BARRINGTON - A local couple has been charged by the police with illegally serving alcohol to minors during a New Year’s Eve party at their home.

The party came to the attention of the police after 13 pictures of the Barrington imbibers, ages 17 to 20, were posted on Facebook.com, a social networking site, under two different names.

See the full article here.

Perhaps the most interesting reactions in these situations is that the students who are disciplined or reprimanded cry foul- invasion of privacy. Now I am not condoning nor condemning the actions of the schools (at this point, anyway) but the issues of privacy invasion seems to be a crazy defense. For some reason we still think that our lives are private even when we place them on the Internet for anyone to see. Most of the time what people post may be at best silly or irrelevant. It may, however, come back to haunt you. It makes you wonder what some investigation or Senate hearing for a nominee might look like in 25 or so years.

What we have is a desire to be famous- to see ourselves on the Internet. Many, many years ago I was in the Peanut Gallery on the Howdy Doody Show. I was more interested in seeing myself and my brother on the monitor off to the side of the stage. "Hey, look, that's me!" Facebook and MySpace and the other "social networking sites are the same. Notice me. See me. See me making a fool of myself when drunk.

So don't complain when someone sees you and calls you to task- asking you to take responsibility for your actions. The real defense, however, may be a constitutional one- the right to not incriminate oneself. But then again there has never been any law against acting stupid.
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But one of the other things that is happening is an extreme Zero Tolerance policy that can become guilt by association, even when there's no association. Take a look at this one:

School Cop Investigated for Porn Link on Friend's MySpace Profile -- Updated
By Kevin Poulsen

In the goofiest waste of law enforcement time we've seen in weeks, an on-campus police officer for a Florida middle school is facing a criminal investigation over his MySpace account. Why? It turns out one of the people on his friends list had a link on his or her profile to an internet porn site.

Or, as the St. Peterburg Times puts it, "kids could navigate from Officer John's page on the social networking site to 'Amateur Match Free Sex' in just three clicks."

You're reading correctly. Gulf Middle School resource officer John Nohejl didn't have porn on his MySpace profile, and he didn't link to porn. But one of the 170-odd people on his friends list, which seems mostly populated by students at his school, had a link to a legal adult site. Now the New Port Richey Police Department and the Florida attorney general's elite cyber crimes unit are investigating him for making adult content available to underage children.

Article here

So what you post may get someone else in trouble, too. What a world. I once heard an ethicist comment in a video that our understandings of ethics and laws are often many years behind the technology. What a struggle it can be until they catch up- by which time the technology will have moved on.