“While networked context shifts the focus away from interests onto people, it is also vulnerable to the architectural aspects of mediated environments. Even though most participants are primarily focused on the contexts in which they participate on social network sites, search (combined with massive media panic) has once again allowed adults to rain on teens’ parade and bosses to invade employees’ personal space. While the future of situational management in mediated environments is quite unknown, the context collisions in social networks have raised numerous questions about the right to privacy in digital public spaces. Context matters and people want to have some level of control over their audience. After all, ‘it is MY space!’” (Boyd).
I thought this was an interesting point made by Boyd in the reading, and one which we should discuss in creating our social networking map. Especially right now, before the true launch of the program, we need to address what kinds of architectural aspects of creating a mediated environment we are going to run into that might be a detriment to our project—we need to also ask ourselves how is the map might be vulnerable when put into the hands of the users. I think that issues of privacy will be at the forefront of potential hindrances because our social networking map is going to hold a tremendous amount of information about organizations, individuals, and their relationships in one very accessible place. Other issues that come to mind include determining the level of investment that is going to be needed in order for this project to be self-sustaining as opposed to constantly having a group (like us) devoted to researching and redefining relationships and other information. How should we work around this potential problem? What other areas of vulnerability does the class see for our project, and how can we address them before they become major issues?
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