How much do you personalize your own facebook or (if you have one still) myspace settings? Do you add anyone to be your friend, or let people see your wall or comments?
I'm sure you can see where this is leading. More and more, as time goes on, people tell us to protect our information on the web. The Internet is a public sphere, whether right or wrong. This means, YOU need to change the settings to make your profile private.
What's the worst that could happen? An invasion of privacy? This officer had to provide his password for his job. Students risk college admission . These are huge things. Employment, educational opportunity, even issues of relationship status and what about age discrimination, race discrimination, sexual orientation discrimination, religion discrimination. All because of a social networking site?
How about a group of netizens finding a comment to a friend, made in a different transition of your life, and causing a kpop national uproar? You are just blowing off some steam, and you thought it was just an innocent comment to a friend about how you are doing in another country. at the age of 18, roughly a senior in high school. When I was a senior in high school, myspace was increasingly popular, xanga was a dying medium but still existed, ect. These are personal thoughts and comments, that you assume that your friends will only read, but ... other people can surely access them.
Is it wrong? Should social networking be automatically private? There were issues in the past about Myspace and child predators. Obviously, Jay Park's example is one of a larger scale. There was issues of nationalism (Korean pride, and also keeping in mind that Jay was a Kpop idol in Korea, where he shot to stardom), cultural differences, interpretation errors/potential exaggerations (translation from English to Korean; potential sarcasm), identity issues (for Jay being a Korean American adjusting to life in Korea, his own dealing with being neither a Korean nor an American, the hard life of a trainee, ect). Stardom -> just like you can shoot to stardom, you can also be dropped.
Also, what role did 2pm play in all of this? Should they have supported Jaebeom and all left JYP together? What would have been a practical solution? Netizens were angry at 2pm (or 1:59pm, depending on your stance). No one thought that 2pm could last after a controversy like this. Is it fair for the members to take the hit for a fellow group member (their leader, for that matter) when they themselves also trained for years to debut in the music industry? They were grouped together by JYP Entertainment, keep that in mind. Of course, they are friends and now "brothers" and one group, ect, but their years of training... done by one controversy, and one that didn't involve them?
There were other hidden elements involved in this issue that are also not discussed, that I obviously don't know about. Even now his role in 2pm is largely taboo for the members, JYP, ect.
Anyway, I digressed from the whole myspace and privacy, but just bringing it back to 2pm. Was it just a huge misunderstanding? An overreaction? They should have just let it go? Had he not gone back to Seattle, would the tension died down enough that he would still be okay to be a part of 2pm?
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