Online Privacy: Who Cares?

In the study of Young & Quan-Haase, a research combined with qualitative and quantitative measure was conducted to examine the privacy concerns of university students - the ones who are the most active in using SNS. The reflected outcome is the desire to protect their social privacy rather than their institutional privacy. It means that they care more about what people in their different social circles know and make sense of their personal information than how other institutions and organizations would make use of their information for different purposes. Even though they are more likely to modify their privacy settings on a frequent basis, most of their personal information such as birth dates, sexual orientation, occupations, etc. are all asked to be listed online.

It is noteworthy that these social network sites along with other online services are accessible for the general population for free while they make a large amount of money through advertising and providing information of users for third party firms and corporations for profits. This is mentioned in Miller (2011)’s “Everyone’s Watching” chapter in his book, thus posing the question of an increasingly surveilled society where not only the government but other kinds of institutions and organizations are also gaining surprising information about the general population.


In this light, the practice of maintain a somewhat shallow level of privacy seems to have more connection and overlap with the attempt of SNS users’ construction and protection of their social identities. This is coming from the suggestion or the real-life experience of certain Facebook users that privacy is only a concern once they or someone they know have experienced a negative consequence as a result of their disclosures and lax privacy setting, leading to their social identities being affected.

As members of a community, it is important for people to know that their online actions can have impact. Additionally, most people, especially young students, are pursuing future careers, and higher education is their launch pad. Social media posts can show up in search engine queries. Companies are no longer just looking at your resume. They want to know what you are doing (and saying) online too. Now, that’s more of the punitive side of things. Digital identity is about much more than just worrying about its effects on future employment or conduct violations. Students or people with a fluent grasp of social media can accelerate their learning, develop meaningful connections with peers, and grow their professional network. What we do online can affect our face-to-face interactions…and vice versa.

That is to say, institutional privacy seems to be a far-fetched concern to most of the people who are aware of its existence. Perhaps is not yet big enough of an immediate concern for people but it should not be neglected. Although the clear line between what information to be put online (and what not to) cannot be drawn, netizens should still be cautious and think twice about what they choose to disclose on the online realm.

Digital Equality: One Laptop Per Child Project

The article written by Lenhart and Horrigan (2008) was an analysis of social, demographic and psychological determinants of those on the spectrum of digital access. There is the detailed and well-drawn spectrum to demonstrate that the “digital divide” is not a dichotomy and as binary as conventionally perceived (some is either an Internet user or is not).

By conducting surveys and interviews, the spectrum of users and nonusers came out with the following actors in the order of increasing connectedness: the Truly Unconnected, the Net Evaders, the Net Dropouts, the Intermittent Users, the Home Broadband Users.

There are multiple reasons for those who are not actively participating and engaging in the Internet realm. They range from the immediate condition such as no one in the community or within the social network of the participants use the Internet to the more structural socio-economical reason that I’d like draw more attention to. It is the perceived structural unequal distribution of resources. as cited by Van Dijk (2005). This inequality causes unequal access to digital technologies, which causes unequal participation in society. This creates the vicious circle of unequal distribution of resources.

As an enthusiastic advocate for action-oriented engagement of citizens to create positive social impacts, I was quite interested in the foundation “One Laptop Per Child” (OLPC) initiated in 2006 and maintained by Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab. With all the ups and downs, initial success and challenging bumps along the way, the project has quietly come down to a rest. That said, it is worth a look into this noble and ground-breaking attempt to bridge the digital access gap.


The idea behind OLPC is the noble aim to build inexpensive laptops, $100 per laptop at that, which would be sold to governments in developing countries to be distribute to the children to assist them in their education. As education is one of the most effective ways to break out of the vicious circle of unequal distribution of resources, for ones would get more informed and better equipped with knowledge to utilize and acquire resources available. However, after 8 years of running the project, the final products came out with their own designed hardwares and softwares but would be sold at the cost of $200 per laptop.

During that time, much of the developing world has undergone their own mobile computing revolution. Every year, more and more low-cost manufactured devices are introduced in the market.

“There's the Intel Classmates PC, for example (with similar hardware, but more expensive software than its OLPC cousin); there's the Worldreader project (it delivers villages a library full of e-books via Kindles); and there's the now-infamous Aakash tablet (which was sold in India for $35 but with its reliability and functionality very much in question).

Arguably more significant than the competition OLPC faces from these low-cost tablets and netbooks: 95% of the world's population now owns a cellphone, by some estimates (See Wikipedia's list of mobile phone penetration, broken down by country). Of course, a clamshell phone is hardly the same as a laptop. One has SMS; the other, a command line. Nonetheless, the ubiquity of the cellphone makes it clear that the value proposition of the OLPC device needs to be more than just "access" and "connectivity."

Although the digital divides happening on a local and global level are very much happening, the effects and extends of their impacts are very much far-fetched, requiring thorough measurement the existence of these projects and attempts to bridge the gap is worth honoring.

Couchsurfing: Virtual Community and Community Development

The assigned article for this week by Carter (2005) focuses on Cybercity as a social platform where a whole of virtual community was developed online, people are free to come and interact within this online social space. The author observes how members interact with one another and what are the underlying values that allow and enable members to become so engaged with the community.

The notion of virtual community includes a group of people who tend to build relationships with one another via computer-mediated communication, regardless of geographical distances (Rheingold, 1991)

In brief, a virtual community is perceived as a cyberspace system in which people with shared goals and needs are engaged regardless of where people are located.

As a traveler and an individual who has a significantly offline and present life, the only virtual and online community that I actually am a part of is Couchsurfing. By definition, it is an online platform for travelers all over the world to get in contact with another, it also encourages communications between prospective travellers and potential hosts at destinations. The primary purpose is travelers finding free accommodation offered by the hosts while exchanging culture, language, stories and experiences. That has entailed with many other by-products such as friendships, meeting with local people, a new genuine way of traveling, etc.

Different from Cybercity, Couchsurfing's online platform is only the initial stage of social interactions whereas most of the main interactions are moved offline and take place there. However, in order for members to actually meet offline, a significant part of identity, self-presentation and trust has to be involved. Members who wish to meet with fellow Couchsurfers have to carefully go through their profiles with pictures, details of preferences, personal philosophies and a system of validation through references left by those who have interacted with them before. Thus Couchsurfing is said to have both a virtual and real element of community, we must look at how virtual and real communities are defined.

Relating to one of the main findings in Carter (2005)’s articles, participants of the Cybercity virtual community find it valuable and important that: You get to know each other from the inner person and out [online] – in real life you know people from outside and later inside. So in that way the two are composite. And knowing the inner person first – you see that looks aren’t that important.

This is also especially true for the community of Couchsurfing, it has evolved to be more than just free accommodation, in order for the surfers and hosts to have a pleasant experience, both parties have the initiative to look for and carefully scan the profiles of one another to ensure that the other parties are compatible and have at least some potential of connection when interacting. Thus, looks and appearances don’t play a big factor in connecting people

And while interacting, topics such as knowledge, traveling experiences, cultural and language exchange often come up. It also takes a certain level of trust, kindness and openness for most of people to actually join the Couchsurfing community (opting out those who treat the site as a dating platform or any other different purposes). Thus it can be an opportunity to empower individuals and groups of people by providing them with the social skills, life experiences that they can harness to effectively change their own community (in this specific regards, the hospitality and kindness towards others), fitting in with the concept of “community development”.

Specifically, empirical evidence based on a virtual community (CouchSurfing.com) demonstrates that the opportunity to de-velop relationships between potential travellers and locals has gradually increased.

Community development should be understood as being more than economic empowerment: it is the recognition of the solidarity of communities to act in order to better their circumstances, whether the communities are real or virtual, and whether their circumstances find them in the global north or the global south. A CSer perhaps put it best: "Couchsurfing helps to eliminate the "us" vs "them" in the world. It creates a world of "we"." An overwhelming majority of respondents said that couchsurfing.org had “changed their lives.” It is no small coincidence that these are the words used to describe this virtual travel community. Couchsurfing.org is an intriguing project that could have important implications for the future of travel and cross-cultural exchange.