Some interesting articles came across my screen this morning while I was working on some podcasts. The first was a story from RRW that Trent Reznor is kinda quitting Twitter along with other celebrities who are also jumping off the Social Networking bandwagon. The second was from the Times, on how Les sages have ripped the heart out of France’s proposed Internet piracy law.
The first article brought up some of the issues around the realities of the ‘net that were formerly limited to the geeks using boards, but that are now an issue for the lay user, trolls. For those who have been online for a long time and have used public message boards or chat systems, trolls are a common and generally identifiable annoyance. But for people jumping onto Twitter, especially those who are used to the “walled garden” of Facebook, trolls are a new annoyance that are stealing all the fun. The closest these new users have come to trolls in the past might have been spammers, but even then, Social Networks are believed by many to be “safe and personal”. Certainly not a place for spammers and other floatsam and jetsam. Toward the end of the article it brings up the reason why these two beasts have been with the online user for so long – for the longest time, anonymity was the fact of the ‘net and this was as much due to there being no systems for validating the nature of the agent behind a user. This lead to an effort to try to educate kids and others about all manner of evil doers that might lurk online and no matter how “we” might try, there will never be a way around the fact that people who want to raise trouble will lie, cheat and steal (as is their nature) to create a false identity for themselves. This means we will never really be able to get people to stand behind what they say because there will always be a chance for them not to be who they say they are. And we have to ask ourselves, do we really want to be in a world that allows only one identity? Many of us have multiple identities… we are a different person on the playground, kitchen and in private as adults. Teens, who are trying to define themselves are just as likely to have as many identities as there are hours in a day. Both are natural, neither are trying to deceive.
The second article raises an interesting point in law… at least for those countries that have some manner of constitution that is similar to France, that:
free access to public communication services online” is a right laid down in the Declaration of Human Rights, which is in the preamble to the French constitution
Seeing as industry types (aka RIAA and their ilk) were watching it set a precedent, it now seems that this ruling sets the ball rolling around the world for users to have far more rights, at least with regards to how they might get their hands slapped should they get caught with their hand in the digital cookie jar. This seems to follow
So it seems that you can’t cut users off for pirating (we’ll leave what pirating is and isn’t up in the air for now, especially with the Pirate Party winning a seat in the European Parliament), as access to the ‘net is a right and you can’t ever expect people to be who they say they are online and in an increasingly public online world, this means that there are many more nasty users out there who we can’t expose. It seems that the ‘net is going to be a wild and potentially dangerous place for some time to come and we need to make sure we teach new users, be they 2 or 200, how to stay safe and be responsible online.
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