I read an interesting article that
discussed how Big Data could cripple Facebook. It started by discussing a
startup company called SmogFarm that has a product, KredStreet, that uses
sentiment analysis on stocktwits. It measures reality vs past sentiment in
order to determine accuracy and give rankings. This product holds people accountable
for what they’ve said and predicted in the past. Imagine what happens when this
kind of sentiment analysis is applied to Facebook.
Already,
there is software out there that can get meaning out of seemingly useless data
very easily. In the near future, people believe that employers can simply point
some software at a prospective employee’s facebook profile and find out a lot
of information about them without spending any time. The things that software
could learn about a person are: work habits, failures, emotional issues,
attitudes about authority, etc. There is also research to bake this up.
Researchers at Cambridge University studied 58,000 people’s “likes” on
Facebook. They were then able to build a model that was able to predict the
following things: homosexuality in men (88%) and in women (75%), ethnic
background (95%), gender (93%), religious affiliations (82%), political
affiliations (85%), use of addictive substances (75%), and relationship status
(67%).
Once people realize that this can
be done easily, people will stop sharing so much information on Facebook, and
other social media, according to Evans. Zuckerberg’s Law is that every year the
amount of information people share on the Internet doubles. Will this hold true
after people realize that potential employers can learn a lot more about them
than they ever thought?
I agree
that once people realize the implications of their social media use some will
change how they use it. However, adults tell high school and college kids all
of the time to be careful what they post on the Internet because you can never
take it back. Students are warned of how employers can use what you post on
social media to make decisions about you as a potential employee. Yet, if you
take a look at a lot students’ facebook profiles, it appears as if they had
never been warned. Teenagers and young adults think that bad things won’t
happen to them, they are invincible.
Now, once
there actually are repercussions to people for what they post on Facebook, they
might change how they use it. I don’t think people will stop using it though. According
to a recent study, the average American spends around 8 hours a month on
Facebook alone. That is a whole workday’s worth of time on one social media
site. People aren’t just doing to magically stop using it because it’s possible
for people to know more about them than they would like. I think that some
people will stop or dramatically change how they use it, but I think the
majority of people will continue to use it how they are now.
Sources:
http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/30/big-data-could-cripple-facebook/
http://mashable.com/2011/09/30/wasting-time-on-facebook/
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ReplyDeleteCheck out my post on the MIT study. This post is very similar in content and meaning. It seems that the conversation about social media is shifting from how it is addictive and time-consuming to how it can do some serious damage.
ReplyDeleteYou bring up an interesting point about what this could potentially teach people as it relates to sharing private information. I would say that a big reason that people don't heed the warnings of our elders about what we post is because we feel like we can erase or hide all of it when the time to job hunt approaches.
I disagree to your statement about people changing their habits. I truly believe that we are beginning to see a shift in how people view both the internet and social media. I think that 1 of 2 things will happen. 1 - there will be some significant privacy restrictions and software changes to prevent the harvesting of such information. or 2 - people will start to bail on social media and take legislative action to remove their electronic footprint.
Maybe saying they won't change their habits is a bit extreme. However, I don't think will stop using social media, I think they'll just use it differently, and only some people at that. It all depends on how businesses/employers use the data that they can get. I feel that some employers won't use social media to base their hiring decisions, some will use it a little, and some will use it a lot. If every employer were to use it, I think facebook habits would change a lot. But I don't think this is the case.
ReplyDeletePeople use facebook so much these days. Check out this infographic for example http://www.getelastic.com/how-people-use-facebook-infographic/. And the data is from 2011. Think about how much social media has changed in the past year alone. I feel that it's just so convenient that it'll be hard to convince people who aren't directly affected by issues with hiring to stop using it. One of the most interesting statistics on the inforgraphic for me was the amount of people that use facebook to find out about current events. That tells me that people are using facebook for a lot more than just posting pictures and sharing tidbits about their day. People are using facebook to stay connected not just to their friends but to the world.
I do think that things are going to change with facebook, and social media in general, in the coming years due to big data. However, I'm still not convinced that it will really hurt social media. I think it will just speed up the change in the way that social media is used. We are in the age of social media and it's going to take a lot to change that.
I think it is very fair to say that the way social media is used is changing. I believe the consequences of "putting too much on the internet" are becoming more real and being felt by more people every day.
ReplyDeleteI am not exactly sure how the privacy functions work on Facebook, for example. They seem to store everything. I don't know if everything is actually gone forever when a user deletes their profile. Personally, my privacy settings are set to where only my approved friends can see my information, but I don't really trust that that is fact. I still use the "what would your mother think" rule on FB, and I think more and more people are starting to move that direction every day.
This is a very important point. I would be fairly intrigued to see how much of these predictions were overtly obvious or if they were particularly nuanced connections. Would these connections be obvious, such as predicting a user's religion based on the fact that they like a religious institution, or more complex like predicting a user's religion based on the fact that they like a musician or clothing brand? It also appeared that they only succeeded in predicting a binary choice, e.g. homosexual/heterosexual or male/female. This information could be extremely useful in some situations, but may not be particularly useful in others.
ReplyDeleteI also found it interesting that the dataset used in the study described in the second article came from volunteers. Did this study include only public likes or did it include likes that would be protected by the privacy settings?
Overall, I think this study raises more questions than it answers. How important are any of the predictions that they were able to make anyway?
I personally doubt that studies such as this will have much of an effect on social network usage. I think that there is a paradigm shift that will occur within the next few years. Control of your personal data will continue to be largely the responsibility of the user. However, the expectation that people must hide the indiscretions of their youth will be lessened. More of a "boys will be boys" attitude will prevail as the pool of number of people who have their indiscretions hidden dwindles.
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