A couple of days ago, I stumbled upon an article about A&M’s partnering with Foursquare. Previously, I had little to no idea what Foursquare even was (originally, after seeing some things about it on Facebook, I assumed it was another digital snake or Farmville game craze, but of virtual four square). Evidently, as Michael Green, a student at A&M who is largely responsible for the school’s involvement, summarizes, “[Facebook and Twitter] focus on telling your friends what you are doing. Foursquare focuses on telling them where they are." The article continues to explain that, “Users with the most check-ins at a location in the past 60 days are appointed ‘Mayor’… Users can also add tips and information about venues and create lists of things to do when visiting a place.” In general, the concept is a pretty cool idea. Especially as A&M's partnership is to encourage students to find out interesting things about campus and share that with friends. Through this network, users’ identities are shaped by expressing the things they like to do and places they like to go. It also grants the user more control over others’ interpretation of their identity with the capability of leaving tips and ideas of things to do, which could prevent a person from having a bad experience at a place, and then coming back and judging the mayor of that place for being mayor of something lame.
Interested, I decided to check Foursquare out for myself. I was mildly disconcerted, upon reaching the homepage, to find a stream of people who I didn’t know and their frequented locations (i.e., announcement of their new mayoral status). Digging a little further, I found I could see a list of an individual’s locations, the number of times they’ve checked-in, and also a map with a physical address of said locations. I could not, however, find a list of people who have checked in at a location itself. To respect privacy to an extent, the map for places tagged as “Home” shows only the location as a general area, instead of a physical address. Realistically, however, almost anyone could open a local phonebook and find your name and address. As the article summarized, Foursquare allows your friends to know where you are, but it can also allows complete strangers to know where you are too.
Hmm that's an interesting idea. Personally, I think it is a little much letting everyone know where you are. Now with this new Foursquare craze added to our digital tools, people can see where we are, what we're thinking, they can look at our pictures, etc. I think it's getting a little out of hand.
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