I’ve been thinking…when you blog or twitter or update your facebook profile and so on…a whole bunch of people hear about it (with the exception of my blogs - cue tumbleweed and church bells). So, present company excepted, it’s like being famous..and lots of people want to be famous…and so social networking works.
If you’re famous it’s nice because you get more attention and maybe the fast track in life and, who knows, maybe more money, sex, power…but on the other hand you also have reporters going through your garbage to find what brand of toilet paper you use (presumably from a receipt obviously) and paparazzi shoving lens in your face. This is probably akin to the privacy concerns of online social networking and digital living these days - though in our case it’s more self inflicted.
So whilst it’s nice to have the social fame and influence, we also need to be aware of the downsides - potentially we could become famous not just to our friends, family and colleagues but also to less desirable people like spammers or scammers to whom we would much rather remain entirely anonymous and unnoticed..