It is hard to define "dangerous materials" on the internet as it very much depends on your age, race, class, gender or how easily offended you are. What is dangerous or frightening to one person may be overlooked by another. Looking at it this way, dangerous materials are everywhere. Pornography is one such example. If you intend to look at it or not, it is easily encountered. Even on some academic websites you see adverts such as "Hot busty babe 18+ available now" or on file-sharing websites such as zshare, adverts of scantily-clad women appear. Therefore in this case, dangerous materials are prominent. Dangerous materials are often masked as innocent pages or files. On Windows Live Messenger, several viruses send messages from contacts asking you to download their new pictures or check out a file, when in fact this is a virus or trojan horse.
As part of a community, you can also be exposed to dangerous materials. If someone shoots down your opinions or flames you down on a regular basis, leading to potentially serious consequences such as a story in which a man committed suicide on webcam (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23390052-details/British+man+commits+suicide+on+live+webcam/article.do). He joined a chatroom specifically designed for people to insult each other, and committed suicide - this may have been his intention, but surely people egging him on wouldn't have helped. Chat rooms and communities such as this are a danger on the internet and should be approached with caution.
If the "freedom" of the internet allows things like that to happen, then it certainly isn't always a positive thing. However this is a minority and for every flamer or "jerk" there are several valued internet users and members of communities. If used in a good way then freedom of information and speech can achieve many positive things.
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It really bothers me that pornography can pop up when you least expect it, for example on advertisements on completely clean web-sites. Surely there should be tighter regulations on this? You wouldn't be able to put an advert of a similar nature in a newspaper, on television or on the radio, so why is it allowed on the Internet?
ReplyDeleteIf it were an individual posting an unsuitable image on a forum, say, I wouldn't have as much of a problem with it, however, it's a company who is making money through the advertisement which I think is immoral and shouldn't be allowed because children are able to and often DO stumble upon unsuitable images inadvertantly.
This is better James,
ReplyDeleteThe url brings your post to life doesn't it? This is a key element of Web 2.0, the way people point up content they've found to others.
This post deserves a lot of comments (HINT HINT everyone) because it puts the target for discussion 'up front and centre'.
I think there is a lot of hype about the dangers of Inet content. Disturbing images and statements are partly in the eye of the beholder and generally easy to ignore/forget. (Two elephants having sex is a wildlife TV programme scoop, two consenting adults humans having sex for the video camera is 'biology' in Sweden, a death sentence in some other countries).
However, the ability for the Inet to collect information on users (which can be bought or stolen and used to ruin people) seems a real problem to me.
Anonymity in some sense is important in many areas of online use -that's not the same as masquerading as someone/thing your'e not.
With regard to the 'Live Suicide' online. There are disturbed people everywhere -and some of them take their own lives. I agree with James that being egged on by others is a disturbing notion. But perhaps in that community he is now a'star' -however depressing and inhuman that might seem to most of humanity. In a world where so many feel they have a right to be noticed, perhaps he felt fulfilled by his final act of self determination?