The Networked Public: Living next door to Alliluyeva!

The networked public is a hybrid of offline and online communities. The public not only are part of offline communities such as their neighbourhood, but they are also equally part of online communities such as social networking websites like twitter and Facebook.

In the networked public you can know just as much about online friends as you do about Mary who lives next door. When I was in secondary school, I made friends with a guy named Derek. I thought I knew him reasonably well. It was only in 6th year while attending his funeral, I realised that he was an influential part of the online gaming community in Ireland. The man who gave the eulogy had pretty much never met Derek offline and yet he spoke so fondly of him. It was that day I learned that Derek, known as younGGuns 78, founded one of the largest Irish Xbox Clans in the gaming community, The WildRovers. The tributes to him online were equally as heartfelt as those offline. He lived his brief life in a networked public.

Presentation in the networked public is just as important online as it is offline. People care about their image. The likely hood is if you have a picture of yourself that you don't like, you untag it or delete it. If you go for a job interview, you wear a suit. Some employers have requested to see the interviewee's Facebook page in a job interview. They don't expect to see drunken pictures of a night you can't remember. They expect your online presentation to be as professional as the suit you are wearing offline. Personally I believe that online presentation is none of your employers business. So long as you don't mention or talk about your employer's online, especially on a public forum, pictures should be irrelevant.

Unfortunately it remains an issue. If a client or employer 'adds' you on Facebook, you will need to keep tabs on the pictures you are tagged in. It is not safe enough to have secure profile settings on websites such as Facebook. Somebody else who is tagged in the same picture may not have the same settings and then you will appear on a public level for potential clients and employers to see. Some rivals may even use this as ammunition.

Personally I am happy with my own presentation online. At times in the past I have shown naivety with  comments I have posted and account settings I have overlooked. However, I have learned from these mistakes. My approach is not to publish something that you wouldn't  expect to see in a newspaper. I may still show a bit of naivety by not untagging certain pictures of myself but I feel you have to have a bit of character and personality online. Although I will untag or 'delete' an image of myself for vein reasons, I generally leave an image up if it is funny. If it turns out I don't get a job on this basis then that person or company is not worth working for. I have the same name on all of my online profiles, 'imRobinbanks' (where possible). This makes me easier to find, but I don't care, I have nothing to hide or be ashamed of.

There are arguments that there may be implications for people that grow up having always lived in a networked society. Maybe a child will consider a friend to be a digit or avatar and popularity to be the highest number of 'friends' on a social networking site, who knows?

Traditionally offline, Children that were bullied in school, had the refuge on their own home. This was a time before the internet and mobile phones. Although a child was being bullied in school, they could always have the security of going home in the evening and not having to worry about it for the rest of the day.

 However, with the networked society, cyber-bullying exists. A kid who gets bullied in school, does not have the safety and comfort of going home in the evening time. The bullies will text them at home and bully them online. Bullying in the networked public therefore has the potential to become 24/7. This has the potential to increase already high rates of suicide amongst the young. I spoke the other week of the story of Megan Meier. A 13 year old girl that committed suicide because of the online deviance of a neighbouring mother.

Online deviance is another issue in the networked society. Online dating is expected to yield a sexual revolution. Perhaps it already has. There are great dangers with this however. With online dating, comes the presence of sexual predators. Online you can be anybody in the world. I talked about the film 'CatFish' a few weeks ago. The story of a man who falls in love with a girl only to discover the girl is not in-fact anything like what he'd been deceived into thinking she was. In the networked public, companionship is easily available whether it be an affair you want to have or just friendship you wish to seek, the websites are there.

However, if people don't take precautions, they are leaving themselves at risk to all sorts of predators. Equally, children can lie about their age and go on such sites and put themselves at risk when meeting people offline. Pedophiles will target kids on all sorts of social networking sites in an attempt to meet them offline. If we are not careful online, we run the risk of being in all sorts of trouble offline. You have to be sure about a person before you meet them and one should never assume by a person's online presence that they are trustworthy. If you haven't previously met them offline, be careful.

Naturally enough Online deviance in the networked public has lead to all sorts of moral panic. To date some of the biggest moral panics, surround teenage girls. Parents are worried about their daughters losing their sexual innocence online. They are worried about the revealing pictures their kids post of themselves and they are worried that they will be targeted by predators.

There was a recent example of moral panic in Holland when a 13 year old Dutch girl allegedly killed herself because her name appeared on  a slut list. It was thought a boy put her name on it. These lists are known as Banga lists and if your name appears on it, you are supposedly easy to get with.
It turned out the girl did not commit suicide for the suggested reason in the news report above. Stories like the one above will only lead to more moral panic however.

On this occasion I believe parents are right to be concerned. Now more than ever, kids know more about technology than their parents do and it is possibly the most important technology to know about,the internet. That should be worrying to any parent. So when they read an hear about teen suicides from cyber bullying and the risks of online predators, they are bound to panic. Maybe some cases and examples are exaggerated but it is certainly better to exaggerate than to underestimate.

Thats enough culturing about for this week.

P.S
I forget!

Hacktually activism?

This week I would like to talk about online civil disobedience and "Hacktivism".

According to dictionary.reference.com, civil disobedience is,

"the refusal to comply with certain laws or to pay taxes and fines, as a peaceful form of political protest."

Recently people have started using online means such as twitter to exercise civil disobedience.

A good example of online civil disobedience is Grey tuesday. In 2004, music company EMI put a ban on the release of Danger Mouse’s Jay-Z Black Album/The Beatles White Album hybrid, known as The Grey Album. In Protest a group of websites agreed to either make the album available for download or to turn grey in protest on Tuesday 24th of February. EMI issued minimal punishment to the websites, a letter of cease and desist being the height of it.




So what about "Hacktivism"? . . .According to Oxforddictionaries.com, a hacktivist is "a person who gains unauthorised access to computer files or networks in order to further social or political ends". The best examples of this are from groups such as Anonymous and Lulzsec.




Anonymous are a network of appropriately named anonymous hackers. According to their website they focus on " promoting access to information, free speech, and transparency". Anonymous are known for campaigns such as project Chanology. The campaign began in 2008 when the group released the "message to scientology" video stating Anonymous' intent to remove the church of scientology's online presence. In this case, Anonymous believed that the leaders of the Scientologist church were censoring material and releasing propaganda videos online. They state in the video below that because of this "Anonymous has therefore decided that your organisation should be destroyed for the good of your followers, for the good of mankind and for our own enjoyment".












The campaign has included making scientology.org unavailable to its intended users, this is known as denial of service attacks. Anonymous also attack scientology centres with a vast range of prank calls and black faxes.




Anonymous criticised the medias reporting of the campaign and released another video asking people to google Lisa McPherson, suggesting Scientology had an involvement in her death. The group have also organised various protests against scientology. The church of scientology attempted to get an injunction ordered on Anonymous claiming that a number of death threats stemmed from the groups campaign against the church. The FBI dismissed the claims stating there was no evidence to link Anonymous to the threats.




Another computer hacking group Lulzsec have claimed to be responsible for several high profile attacks such as the leaking of personal information from sony accounts on the ps3 network. This resulted in Sony locking down PSN (Playstation-Network) accounts in light of the attacks for fear of further hacking. Lulzec reportedly used sql data to hack the PSN accounts.




Hacks from groups like Anonymous and lulzsec can be seen as non violent protests. They believe the organisations they attack are corrupt and therefore hack them. The groups never use violence to campaign against the alleged corrupt organisations. Some people may argue that the threats they issue can be seen as provoking but all protests generally are offensive or provoking to one side of the debate. From my research I get the impression that these hacktivist organisations often exaggerate the facts. Lulzsec claimed 1000,000 PSN accounts were at risk during the attacks on the Sony PSN. However, Sony claimed the figure to be in the region of 37,000. I'd imagine the figure was probably somewhere in between.




I personally don't see anything wrong with what they are doing. Although it may be illegal in some cases, a lot of the hackers seem to come from within the industries they are hacking so maybe they know what they are talking about. Although Anonymous often state they hack "for our own enjoyment" they usually show creditable evidence to justify their attacks, an example being Leah McPherson in the Chanology campaign.




If anything Lulzsec's attacks on the PSN network showed how carless Sony were with the privacy settings surrounding user accounts. I thought maybe it was wrong to jepordise user information in the way Lulzsec did. However, when I recall the time it happend, My friends didn't appreciate the PSN attacks as they couldn't play 'Call Of Duty" for a while. None of them ever complained about their accounts being at risk. Most people took it with a pinch of salt. My opinion is possibly biased however as I am a bit of a 'Nerd' when it comes to technology. From basic programming and hacks that I have learned throughout my degree I find this sort of stuff fascinating.







Finally I am going to talk about Political campaigns that target social media. More and more Political campaigns are targeting social network sites for votes. This is mainly because such social networking sites are where the youth 'hang out'. Obama had a strong online campaign in the 2008 presidential elections. This example below being my favourite example of it. You can still experience this video on the original website here.









In general the youths don't have the same, if any, interest in politics as older generations do. There is therefore an opportunity through targeted social media to make politics seem 'cool'. I say this because when I saw the above video I tweeted about it and posted it on facebook to all of my friends. My friends thought it was cool and they posted about it too. If I was an american and saw this video, I would consider voting for Obama. I was 18 at the time of the election and my knowledge of politics then isn't what it is now so I may have voted on something based on watching a video such as this.




In the past, I have watched some of the political debates on TV in the build up to an election. Often I found them hard to follow because of the 'grown up' language they use. So I can understand why political campaigns are targeting social media as videos such as the above are something I can relate to. In the video there is a simple message, don't waste your vote. It is easy to follow and told in a humorous way. Fine Gael had a mario style video game on their website in the build up to the last general election. Young people will hear about things like this on sites such as twitter. They will google it and they will want to play it. It gives young people a link to a party despite not knowing anything about it. If a young person goes to vote and sees a ballot full of faces and names they have never heard of, they are possibly likely to vote for Finé Gael based on the Mario game they played.




Personally I developed an interest in politics from studying irish history in school. It was my favourite subject and learning about the men and women who fought for irelands independence inspired me to want learn more about how our country is governed . There is still a lot about politics I don't know, I am young after all. I am not tied to any party but I would never vote for sinn Féin based on their links to the IRA. It doesn't matter how good their targeted social media could be, I would just never give them my vote. For any other party however, I would perhaps consider giving somebody a vote based on a good social media campaign. It almost feels like the party or person in question has made more of an effort for people such as myself who spend a lot of time on social media sites.




However, giving somebody a vote based on a good social media campaign is about the height of it. It could never sway me to go and actively campaign for somebody. Young people such as myself only care about one thing, getting a job after college and making money. Unless a social media campaign for a political party was offering me a job relevant to my qualifications and a decent wage, I would never become politically active in the form of canvasing for parties. If somebody asked me to make a video for a campaign however, then perhaps I would. Targeting social media would definitely make me more aware of politics as sites such as twitter make me more aware of everything else going on in the world via trends and links.




Thats enough culturing about for this semester.




P.S




Lets Hope I remember something for my exam.