The more I began to think about it, the more I realised how much of our lives we actually track ourselves, without even realising we’re doing it. Most people these days own a camera phone; in fact, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t, not excluding my eighty year old Grandad. On my mobile phone alone I have nearing 5000 photographs, taken as I’ve travelled all over the world. Scrolling through this endless amount of photos in my phones camera roll got me thinking how upset I’d be if I lost my mobile and it ended up in the hands of a stranger. I’ve somewhat tracked my life with the photos on my phone over the eighteen months I’ve owned it, taking a photo most days, I can remember what I’ve done with my life and who I’ve spent time with over the period that I had this phone. One of the readings we looked at last semester made me think again about social media and how this acts in the same sort of way. On my Facebook profile I have over 1000 friends and thinking about it, not even 100 of these are people that I would consider ‘friends’, acquaintances yes, people who I’d say hello to on the street, but not people who I’d rely on or speak to on a regular basis, some of those on my Facebook friends list I’ve never even spoken to before in my life. Reflecting on this, the amount of personal information available for these strangers who I’ve accepted as an online ‘friend’ have access to is scary, personal photographs, location information and easy viewings of my online conversations (Meikle, Young(2012) Pp- 59). We all hear of videos or images on the net going ‘viral’, showing how powerful the web really is, mass media has the capability to reach a huge global audience within a matter of minutes on the internet which makes it the most dominant way of sharing information to a large audience in the smallest amount of time (Curran, Seaton 2010, Pp-98). The media industry is consistently developing alongside communications technologies, not long ago sitting on your sofa watching television was a one way thing, getting angry and yelling at the screen because your favourite football player isn’t performing has now changed, with the development of social networking sites such as twitter it’s easy to share your opinion with the millions of other viewers watching and yelling alongside you, from all across the globe, interacting with each other and sometimes even with the television personality themselves (Meikle Young (2012) Pp-70). After thinking about how influential the internet can be, and the amount of personal information users publish to their online social networking profiles without giving it a second thought made me look into stories of online posts affecting employment opportunities. I found several reports claiming employees have actually lost their jobs over status updates, inappropriate images being posted online and private messages being made public. I also found some cases in which potential employees were asked to log into their social network profiles during job interviews (Meikle, Young (2012) Pp-78). Personally I work for a large retail company and in my contract I signed to say I would be respectful and appropriate on my online profiles, showing the influence social networking has and how it is a form of surveillance that we don’t even give a second thought.
