Facebook, Twitter users avoid parents, bosses

By Yoon Ja-young

Kim Ju-yeon, an office worker in Seoul, was embarrassed when she logged on to Facebook. Her boss had sent her a friend request.

“I wondered how he found me since I don’t use the company e-mail for Facebook. Most of all, I never expected him to be using this service,” the 31-year-old said.

According to Kim, the next thing she did was check her old postings to see if she had left any negative comments about her boss, her job, or any colleague, and then pondered whether to accept the request. She just ignored it, but she hasn’t been making any updates to her Facebook since then.

Many people are using social networking services (SNS), and realize they have to expose much of their private information for the benefits the services offer. However, they are embarrassed to find some people to whom they wouldn’t want to provide access to their private lives. SNS allows them to show these people only certain information, but such management is time-consuming.

The number of Facebook users is decreasing in the United States, Britain and Canada, and Forbes says it is because children don’t want to be friends with their parents. It added that Facebook is taking their space away by helping parents gain access to their personal thoughts and lives.

Bosses who send friend requests to their staff do so to get better acquainted with them. According to a survey on managerial level staff by Career, a job market information provider, over half of them said they feel marginalized by the lower-ranked employees. Two out of five said they especially felt this when the staff talked about something they don’t know. The bosses, who have been slower in accepting SNS, now take it as a good means of understanding each other and reaching out.

However, other workers don’t necessarily think so. Another survey by Career on office workers showed 76.9 percent of tweeters saying they don’t want their bosses to follow them on Twitter. Nearly 70 percent of them said they won’t voluntarily give their Twitter address to their bosses, and one out of five said they will hide the fact that they are tweeting at all. Their fear is not groundless. Negative comments about bosses or companies sometimes lead to disciplinary action, including dismissal.

Hence, some people are using separate accounts for their close friends. “People are likely to separate their public and private information, and determine whether to make it open it or not, or how much of it they want accessible to all,” said Sung Nak-whan, a researcher at the LG Economic Research Institute. “They will be actively exercising their rights over their information, the right to decide how much of their information will be open, and for whom,” he added.