No one could have predicted how this brain wave could have had such an effect on society’s mode of communication.
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| Tim Berners-Lee |
Berners-Lee’s idea to have a single information network to help CERN physicists share all their information through one network, turned out to be the first spark of innovation in the technetronic era.
Fast forward 20 years, to present day and we can see how that spark has ignited into a gleaming metamorphosis.
These hyperspace modifications have lead to a number of issues we face today such as online personal identity, the negative aspects associated with internet culture and the impact of social media on interpersonal relationships.
These net improvements have also begun other phenomena like the rise of internet culture and decrease of traditional forms of media thanks to the web.
Secrecy
Facebook has consistently pushed its users to make more personal information public over the last several years. It believes in doing so, it will allow them to offer better products to users, and to the marketers and developers who want to reach them. Some users, privacy groups and politicians have matched its moves with vocal protests, lawsuits and more recently, official investigations.
The controversy only appears to be intensifying.
Facebook’s Privacy Policy, as of this year, is now longer than the U.S. Constitution without its amendments. 5,830 words to be exact versus the Constitution’s 4,543 words. Comparing that to over 1,000 words that existed in the policy back in 2005, that’s a 480% increase in complex language, that details how your information is seen by roughly 200 million people who use the site on a daily basis.
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| Facebook privacy |
I believe Facebook’s ambiguity over privacy issues will backfire on users in the future. The people who will be affected the most will be those who do not fully understand how to alter their privacy settings on their account.
We are now in an age where all our future leaders will have an online imprint of all their activity on the information superhighway, ready like ammunition to entangle them in a controversy. The arguments about whether Facebook or the user’s own photos on the social media site, will in my opinion, result in hefty lawsuits in years to come.
Menacing
This leads me to the other side of the internet, the safer but more sinister edge of cyberspace.
This is the growing popularity of being anonymous on the web!
Should people be able to go online anonymously and say what they like, without fear of humiliation or ridicule?
Christopher "moot" Poole aka the anti- Zuckerberg believes so; he is a firm believer in online anonymity. Moot started renowned website 4chan from the tender age of 15 years old. Users generally post anonymously on the site and it has been linked to internet subcultures and activism.
At this year’s South by Southwest Interactive, the annual Austin, Texas festival of geekery, 22-year-old Christopher Poole took to the stage as the keynote speaker.
The key message of his address was “Anonymity is authenticity.”
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| In April 2009, moot was voted the world's most influential person of 2008 by an open Internet poll conducted by Time magazine. The results were questioned even before the poll completed, as automated voting programs and manual ballot stuffing were used to influence the vote. 4chan's interference with the vote seemed increasingly likely, when it was found that reading the first letter of the first 21 candidates in the poll spelled out a phrase containing two 4chan memes: "MARBLECAKE. ALSO, THE GAME." |
I believe his views to be true to an extent, as a lot of people are now very conscious of what they post on sites like Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook. This is because people are connected to a huge variety of people on these sites; like family, friends and work colleagues, so now people are very tactful on what they post online.
In some companies it is mandatory to be connected with fellow workers and managers on Linkedin. Staff members are encouraged to activity post on industry related groups (only things that will reflect well on the company of course!).
It is these reason why people are not acting like themselves online. People are now flocking to sites where you can be face-less. It is a place where you can relax and post about what annoys you about the world today; it’s similar to talking to a psychiatrist, everything is confidential and you feel like a burden has been lifted afterwards.
People are safe in the knowledge that a rant about a particular political party or your views on a controversial issue won’t land you up the creek!
Check it out
Throughout all of our childhood we tried to escape the dreaded question from our parents of:
Where were you?
What time did you get home?
Who were you with?
Yet, as adults we are freely giving that information away to every inhabitant of the web.
This is a result of the new internet cultural phenomenon called “geotagging”. Geotagging is the act of adding geographical identification to our social media activity.
But there is a new threat lurking in the perceived harmless act of checking into your favorite coffee shop, called cybercasing, this menace has derived from the advancement of geotagging. Cybercasing uses data available online to rob your home. Thanks to Foursquare check-ins, status updates on Facebook, location-based messages on Twitter and geotagged photos on Flickr, the bad guys know when you’re out of town!
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Facebook check in. |
This is a serious issue for even the most sporadic social media dabbler. This is not just an issue for the type of person that feels the need to check into every place they visit on a Sunday afternoon stroll. This is because geotagging is an issue for everyone that engages in social networking, this is the case because geotagged information can be automatically embedded by digital cameras and smart phones without you knowing. Hackers are so adept at this form of espionage that there has even been cases of people that use fake names online being tracked down to an exact location.
ASL
Social media is impacting heavily on how human beings interact with each other. Forming a relationship with someone you met online is no longer a taboo; in fact 19% of all Americans that got married in the US in 2010 had met their partners online.
People are now forming relationships with people online and perceive these relationships as being more intense and more committed than they really are.
These people run the risk of alienating the people who populate their daily lives in pursuit of intimacy with online friends.
Catfish, a 2010 American documentary is a shining example of this type of unhealthy online behaviour.
The film follows New York photographer Nev Schulman, who strikes up an intimate relationship with Michigan based artist, Angela Wesselman.
They exchange photos of each other and Angela sends Nev recording of herself singing. Angela even introduces Nev to family members and Nev build’s strong friendships with them also.
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| Catfish movie poster |
The two people’s lives become ingrained within each other’s so much that it is like they are in a committed relationship even before they met.
What transpires is something no one could have expected, Angela is not the 20 something year old artist and singer that Nev is infatuated with. It turns out that she isn’t even the person in the photos she sent him.
Angela is a married middle aged woman that stole a random models facebook profile and she copied other people’s covers of song and pasted them off as her own. The plot thickens even more when Nev visits Angela only to find out that her other family members that he became friends with were in fact just Angela operating multiple facebook accounts.
As it turned out she was acting like a catfish, hence the title, which is an internet term, which means “someone who pretends to be someone they're not, using Facebook or other social media to create false identities, particularly to pursue deceptive online romances”.
Internet Culture
Pop culture is very much a top-down structure, created by a handful of people, distributed through a one-way medium. In a way it is imposed upon society and it is very much controlled by a small-scale group.
Internet culture on the other hand has a bottom-up structure; it tends to take pop culture and remix it and subvert it into a meaning that is different than the original.
One of the main aspects of internet culture is the emergence of internet memes. The term meme was coined by Richard Dawkins. Simply put, it is a self-replicating idea that takes root in your mind and is transmitted to other people.
An Internet meme is an idea that is propagated through the World Wide Web. The idea may take the form of a hyperlink, video, picture, website, hashtag, or just a word or phrase. A meme may spread from person to person via social networks, blogs, direct email, news sources, or other web-based services.
Public relations, advertising, and marketing professionals have embraced internet memes as a form of viral marketing to create marketing "buzz" for their product or service. Internet memes are seen as cost-effective way to create a fashionable and trendy image for their product.
Companies such as Weetabix and Wrigley’s, tagged on to one of the web’s most successful memes called “Loituma Girl”. This meme involves a Japanese anime clip being played repeatedly while a traditional Finnish folk song is played in the background. This amalgamation resulted in a hysterical, nonsensical clip which was adored by millions.
In a way of trying to “get down with the cool kids”, Weetabix and Wrigley’s used the Finnish song in their adverts in an effort to position their brand as youthful and on the pulse. The Finnish band Loituma, were shocked by all the attention they were receiving as they didn’t even know the clip existed.
What will be, will be...
The concept of the internet being in charge has never been truer than in the case of the future of mass media. For the first time ever news exclusives are no longer coming from traditional mediums like print, TV and radio.
The internet has empowered a whole host of tech savvy opinionated citizen journalists. People are now of the belief that if you have something worthwhile to say then the online world is your audience.
Innovations on the internet has almost made print media and to an extent TV obsolete, people (myself included) know the main story’s of the day before they get they out of bed, this is because people are reading free news apps on their Smartphone’s.
Mark Glaser, a freelance journalist who frequently writes on new media issues, said in 2006: “The idea behind citizen journalism is that people without professional journalism training can use the tools of modern technology and the global distribution of the Internet to create, augment or fact-check media on their own or in collaboration with others”.
Internet rules all
The internet has managed to achieve and deceive (facebook in particular) all of this in a relatively short space of time. Here’s one person who is looking forward to the next ten years with anticipation and elation, but my frame of mind would quickly change if I arrived home after writing this piece to find the entire contents of my house to be cleaned out thanks to my need to check into my local coffee shop for a tweet-up!
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