Tag Archives: Young People

Church, Computers/Technology, Current Affairs, Web/Internet

What’s in Facebook Stays in Facebook?

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Not anymore… Facebook have announced that they are adding a public search facility which in a month will be linked into the main Google search allowing anybody to obtain the name and profile picture of any Facebook member. The search will also provide links to Facebook functionality to allow the retrieved Facebook users to be contacted directly.

True they will only be revealing a name and a picture, but it is still a lot less private than before. You can also restrict search access through your profile settings too, but it’s very much an opt out rather than an opt in.

The growing phenomenon of Facebook is definitely starting to cause concern – Om Malik is quoted in the BBC article highlighting that the move turns Facebook into a de-facto phone book of the internet – he also highlights the risk of publishing too much information on your profile when for example people often use their birthday as a significant bit of information for their banks.

There are also growing issues with regards to the fact that the site was previously aimed at students. This is a definite issue with schools, for example at Beth’s school all of the staff with Facebook accounts were called to a special meeting on Monday to in particular highlight the potential issues with the information staff could put on their profiles, and more importantly how to deal with friend requests from students. The same issues will obviously relate to other people who work with young people, for example youth leaders in Churches. How much information are you putting in – and who else is being linked together? Do you really want what you friends are writing on your ‘wall’ to be visibly by those you work with in a professional capacity?

To some extent we’ve had similar issues with this site, as have other teachers with blogs – we try to ensure that we don’t mention Beth’s school by name, or link to it directly (much the same as I do with my employer), and this site is also explicitly blocked on the school servers. Essentially schools all over the world are going through the same issue, but on a much larger scale. After her experience before Beth has said that she is absolutely not going to get a Facebook account -and as I’ve mentioned before, mine is as slim as it possibly can be.

Update: The Scobleizer article that I linked to in the comments section, and the original article that Scoble was answering are well worth a read too. In particular with the original article it is worth considering the question as to what you reveal to whom by joining a city network, and also taking a look at the range of discussion in the comments. There is also some good discussion about perceived versus actual security, particularly with regards to MySpace and Facebook.

Church, Current Affairs

Millions of Dollars Spent, and No Difference

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Tonight we had one of our monthly God @ Work (@ The Pub) sessions in the Queens Oak down the hill from St James. This time Becky had been asked to talk about her work, which is as a school nurse focusing in particular sex education. Becky talked about the difficulties of resolving her personal opinions, with what she feels she should be saying to the young people from a professional point of view, and also what she feels her Christian faith should lead her to tell the young people, and the tension between those aspects of her life. As is quite often the case in such discussions the group quite quickly got onto the subject of abstinence programmes, particularly those backed by conservative Christian groups such as the Silver Ring Thing.

This proved to be a somewhat appropriate topic considering an article this weekend reporting on a report on the effectiveness of abstinence programmes by Mathematica Policy Research in the US. Essentially despite the US government having poured nigh on a billion dollars into abstinence programmes over the past decade, this multi-year comparison of such programmes with regular sex education has shown that there is no difference at all in the outcome. It is quite amazing how closely all the major criteria match between the groups on the abstinence programmes, and the control group, and would certainly be seen as a disappointment to those backing such schemes.

In the UK, abstinence programmes are not as widespread, however with our reputation for the Silver Ring Thing do have a UK programme. Looking at what is officially offered an Ofsted report last week into PSHE (Personal Social and Health Education) in schools found that young people felt that both parents and teachers were not good at talking about sexuality and as a result they were turning to magazines for help. Barely a year ago, another report said that UK sex education was ‘too biological’. It seems almost inevitable that pressure to run more of these abstinence programmes in the UK is going to come – but are they going to be any more successful?

Church, Computers/Technology, Web/Internet

The Popularity of MySpace and Bebo

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As I mentioned in my previous post, tonight we had our planning meeting for the summer term at Youth Group. As usual, the discussion at the meeting also included more general talk about areas of concern, one subject being the popularity amongst the young people of sites like Bebo and MySpace.

In terms of the Church web sites we now have pretty tight rules over the use of pictures of any young people. The rules have actually been tightened several times over the years following concerns expressed by various parents, so you’ll notice that there aren’t any pictures of the Youth Group on this site where the young people are identifiable – and we’ve also tried to make sure that the public photo sets have any pictures with children and young people removed.

However the irony is that you can fairly easily go on to both Bebo and MySpace and locate pages belonging to a large number of the young people in the Church, and of course since the sites encourage people to list their friends, you can from there track through from person to person, browse through photo albums, many of which are helpfully named so you know exactly who you are looking at. Essentially it is just young people socialising, but in an electronic form – however the big problem is how accessible it all is, and how easy it is to build up a picture of them.

Recently, the BBC has produced an article on the issue, and whilst the sites are arguing that they are posting warnings, and trying to educate users, they still have a site that is especially attractive to teenagers. As a result, it is still a matter of some concern to us as youth leaders, quite how much information can be obtained with little or no checks of the person getting the information.