Privacy & Confidentiality

While new media has undoubtedly revolutionized the way we communicate, it does come with severe consequences. One such consequence is the lack of privacy that comes with a technology that allows us to see what anyone is doing at any time. Take Facebook, for example. While you may want to share your profile with close family and friends, you may not want their friends or just random users looking at this information. While there are options to make your profile private, you have to go to great lengths to preventing specific people from viewing your information. Furthermore, while you may want to share a picture with your friends one day, you may several years later want no one to know this picture existed. This is especially true for younger kids and teens, who are not aware of the consequences they post and furthermore, it's irrational to say that they should be aware of everything. No one is perfect and in such cases new media is incredibly unforgiving. Furthermore, new media makes it way too easy for people to find you online. All social networking sites aside, people can find you through blogs that you have to write for school, through your friends accounts, etc. Not only does this make the internet an extremely dangerous place, but it could also be detrimental in other ways. One issue that has come up repeatedly in previous years is the fact that employers are looking at social media profiles of potential employees. This essentially removes the border between personal and professional life. Essentially, people in the new media age are forced to give up a huge part of themselves in order to avoid the problems that come with new media.