The sign of a lazy article is often a quirky survey report. “Ninety per cent of laptops are uninsured against lightning strikes” - I’m sure you have all seen the kind of piece I mean. Inevitably the surveys turn out to have been conducted by vendors selling a solution, and duly issued to the press as “news”.
Recent months have witnessed another great lazy topic to write about: social networking sites. However, rather than acting as an easy source for quirky tales, the sites have become the story.
Recently, I was doing contract work at a site where my immediate colleague seemed to spend most of his time on Facebook. Then one day, he sat back and said, “Who are all these people?”
Somewhere on his road to silicon Damascus, he realised that online social networking is all pretence. You pretend to have lots of friends when in fact they are other people’s friends. They haven’t heard of you until someone who knows someone who knows a mutual acquaintance suggests they join your profile. You’ve never spoken to these people, nor are you ever likely to. But gosh, aren’t you a popular guy?
This colleague proceeded to delete from his profile all the strangers that he was pretending were friends, and declared his regret at wasting so much time on Facebook. He now devotes his working hours to online poker.
The shocking thing is that the guy thought no one was aware of his habit. Naturally, certain dodgy sites are blocked in corporate networks, but social networking sites aren’t banned in the media industry because they are seen, along with blogs, as a potential source of stories.
Like most firms, this particular organisation routinely rolls out new software using remote control tools. One of the IT team laughingly mentioned to me that every time he accessed my colleague’s computer, he found himself staring at the guy’s Facebook page.
Facebook use is not a crime, but it is getting beyond a joke. This means it needs a different kind of treatment than the usual cyber suspects in the enterprise (porn, libellous comments and bullying), especially if social networking sites are used for perfectly legitimate purposes. Companies could look at introducing time limits, or flash up a warning when certain sites are accessed, but these measures are often inadequate, while appearing prescriptive to the end user.
Surely all that’s required is to make the compulsive Facebook users aware that we all know what they’re up to. If my erstwhile colleague had realised the IT team were all sniggering at him behind his back, he might have been shamed into rethinking his working lifestyle.
