Final Blog – Transparency

After reading chapter 9 in Pavlik’s book, Converging Media, we examine the issue of ethical and legal issues with social media. Whether it is privacy or transparency, social media is in a struggle. “The need for transparency is becoming increasingly important with social media – a fact that individuals and organizations forget at their peril” (Pavlik 276). The book uses an example from a popular social networking site, Facebook. In 2009, Facebook had changed their privacy policy without much publicity. When the public found out about the new policy, Facebook was on the spot light. They were receiving threats from the Electronic Privacy Information Center and public outrage. Users of social media in the 21^st century want to be as transparent as possible; however, “transparency often works against strategy making and planning by companies, as they do not want to give away secrets to competitors (Pavlik 276). Many companies describe social media as controlled chaos because of all the information floating around the World Wide Web. It is scary to think something you posted ten years ago on Myspace can still be accessed today. When people post information, they want to know as much things as possible about the company. By not being clear on the privacy policy or what the social media plans to do with the information may make the author not content. Transparency is more important in the online social media world than the offline world. You are more vulnerable online than offline and therefore transparency is not as big of an issue. Overall, transparency is more important online than offline because of the vulnerability and the amount of people that have access to that specific information.