Facebookers have made quite a stink about lack of privacy on Facebook, especially when it comes to what information appears in their news feeds. But marketers aren't the only ones mining this unprecedented access to personal relationships; academic types are too.
Hundreds of thousands of users voiced their concern when Facebook
It shouldn't have been a surprise, then, that there was New York Times, researchers at Harvard and UCLA are monitoring an entire class of college students as they pursue "one of the Holy Grails of social science": whether personal taste determines friendships, or the other way around. Studying the Web 2.0 phenomenon seems to be a growing trend. A California school introduced
A critic might be right to note, as many did when Facebookers protested the introduction of the Facebook News Feed, that if users don't want to be spied on, they should consider making their profiles private. Otherwise, everything you do there is a bit like mooning a TV camera. It doesn't really make sense to shout at the medium, then, for broadcasting it. Like Girls Gone Wild flashers, they're just giving away the goods. I wonder though, if academic studies of online social networking give a true glimpse of human relationships. That "Holy Grail" they're speaking of seems to be only an insight into how humans behave online, sans the regulatory functions of the
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