The information age has bought many things to the world we live in today and certain things that have been created take up a huge chunk of our lives. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter, is said to be what takes up a lot of our time and the social networks account for 20% of the time spent online by all users of the internet with Facebook owning 95% of the time spent on the social networking sites.
With the use of Facebook and Twitter forever increasing, the amount of things people publish on these social networking sites increases also, whether it be writing about their new favourite television programme or about their latest love affair, it all goes on the internet for all to see. Everything that has been published on these sites can be viewed by any of your friends at any time of the day, and if you have your boss or a work colleague as a friend on these types of sites you have to be careful what you write. A young 16-year-old girl, Kimberley Swann, started letting off steam and began to tell her friends of Facebook of how ‘boring and dull’ her new job was, a few days later, while at work she was called into the office and told that her boss has seen her comments on Facebook and, even though the name of the company was never revealed over the social networking site, that the boss didn’t want to see the company in the eye of the world. The company later revealed that the reason her job was terminated with immediate effect was the fact that the comments on Facebook showed that Kimberley was not happy with and didn’t enjoy her job.
This shows the power of social networking sites like Facebook, and how what you write on these sites can affect your personal life.
Another story that caught my eye was a story about a Swiss woman who lost her job after her employers spotted she was using the Facebook website when she had earlier called in to her work place claiming that she was too ‘ill’ to go into work as her job involved using a computer and it would strain her eyes, she would be unable to do her job properly as she was suffering from a migraine and instead of going into work she needed to stay home and lie in a darkened room. The company said its discovery that she was not suffering as much as she made out as she was able to use the social networking site and by doing this she lost the trust of the company. After being dismissed from her duties, the Swiss woman told of how she had been accessing the social network through the Internet on her smart phone while laying in a dark room while in bed, she also spoke of how she was “disgusted” as she couldn’t believe that the company had created a facebook account of a fictional personnel which became “friends” with the woman, which in turn allowed the company to monitor the online activity at any time of the day, she claimed that after her dismissal the “Facebook friend” suddenly disappeared from her personal Facebook page.
As you can properly tell, these two stories are not the first and, all the time people publish their views to the world wide web, by all means will not be the last time that people lose jobs due to things on the Internet. This questions the civil rights and how people cannot have a private life without it affecting the way in which people value and respect them. Without the information age people wouldn’t be able to write about how “boring and dull” their job is online and then would have no risk of losing their job over something like this.
One of the biggest stories in the United Kingdom in 2011 was easily the London Riots, riots that were prompted by the killing of a man by a police officer, which spiralled out of control and turned into building being burned down and “hoodies” and others looting many shops in and around the country’s capital city. There was a lot of publicity over this huge event and there was much talk of the riots being organised on social networking sites and private messaging services like BlackBerry Messenger, more commonly known as BBM. There were rumours all over the Internet that the messaging service was used to conduct a plan causing the riots as the police were unable to see the messages being sent, as the police do not have the privilege of being able to read all of the message sent from BlackBerry to BlackBerry. During and after the riots people were posting, or “tweeting” on Twitter of how pictures were being released on BBM, the media were then able to get hold of the images as they were being put on Twitter. This once again questions the personal rights of any human being, the fact that the media are able to take personal photos, even if they are seen to be showing actions that are considered bad.
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