W4 - Topic 1a: Dangerous materials on the internet (Lister p.181)

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.