Thl00021

Before writing this, I decided to search my name followed by various social media networks on google to see how visible I was. Turns out there are a lot of people called “Tom Lee” around the world so nothing about me immediately came up. However, the addition of “Stirling” to the search took me straight to my respective social media accounts. To my surprise, my Facebook showed pictures from past years and all the things it claimed I had an interest in when I was about 14 and actually bothered liking pages. After seeing this, I decided to clean up my Facebook of any old interests. This made me realise that how visible you are to total strangers or friends of friends is very important. What they see is their first impression of you, just like meeting someone for the first time. Different social media services show different information about you to total strangers. My Facebook will show my university, the town I live in, a collection of pictures and few things I am interested in. I am ok with this, as these things will help someone determine whether I am in fact the “Tom Lee” they are looking for. You have very little control on Facebook. You can control who sees your posts and your friends list, but other information may be out in the public. There is also the speculation that Facebook sells your information to third party companies to help them with marketing. As a marketing student, I don’t see the problem. For a free service that we spend every waking moment using or thinking about in return for someone putting up an advert for a car magazine, because that’s apparently what 14-year-old me was interested in, on my news feed that I am very unlikely to even notice, Sounds like a bargain to me.