A Walk through a Slide
Safety is an important topic in today’s Web 2.0. It can either make the experience, or break the experience. In my writing arts class, “Technologies and the Future of Writing,” my group put together a presentation about online safety. My topic consisted of the negatives on online dating (for clarification on why I didn’t say anything positives – not saying it’s a complete bad idea). The second slide in my presentation was a very important slide in terms of one of the most important slides on my presentation.
It discusses how the identity factor plays into meeting people online and how you can’t determine if someone is being truthful or not if they are presenting themselves to you over the internet. The picture I used (ASL picture to the left) is a picture I made that demonstrates chatting with someone online. I think it was an effective picture because as you can see, there is no indication of who the person’s identity on the other end of the chat room. The person on the left says that they are 18, female, and lives in California – but how can the person on the right be sure of that? And even if the left person isn’t lying, how does she know she isn’t giving her information to some 50 year old weirdo on the other end? Within this slide, I referenced Dick Hardt from his Identity 2.0 video, saying “digital identity is unverified, like verbal information. Like when you meet someone, except there are fewer trust cues because you can’t see or hear the person.” I thought this was an important quote – it’s practically what makes meeting/dating people online such risky business. The most important words are digital identity is unverified. There is nothing saying that Person A or Person B was telling the truth. Overall, in my presentation it was an important step, if not the most important step to online dating – which was why it was my second slide. After this slide, I went further into the process, like people changing their identities and the possibilities of online predators, to the predators having the ability to track people.
What I Learned about my Blog Topic
My topic – safety – seemed to be a pretty basic, common knowledge type of topic. However, there are some aspects of safety that people tend to ignore for the pleasure of the internet’s freedom. In this class, we read an article by Sherry Turkle called “Who Am We?” and in the article, she begins with all the people that are named Sherry Turkle, and continues onto talk about identity online. I think this article was important to my topic because of how important the identity factor is to safety on the internet. Turkle allowed me to look at the positives on having an identity online, and being able to play around with it – it helped me understand that there is always a bad side and a good side to things, even though previously, it would seem that the ability to change and play with your identity could be a bad thing because of how much we equate it to people just being creepy. One thing that I’d like to mention is that during this class, by writing blog posts, and searching for 
articles online that I could discuss in a post – I came across one article in particular (Get ready for more media hacks, Twitter warns) (my blog post: Twitter Security Strikes Out!) that brought something interesting to mind. Over the process of me writing the blog post about information being stolen on Twitter, I stopped to think – What else is being stolen over the internet? When I put my credit card information to a shopping store online, can I really trust that no one is going to steal my information even though it tells me it won’t share or save it? Sites are getting hacked into daily, and I really don’t think anyone – even me – takes the time out of there day to really worry about these times of things. When you want something hassle-free, why not just order it online, right? But who knows if this is really part of the reasons peoples’ credit cards are being hacked into, or worse, their identities being stolen. I learned that no matter what the internet tells me, we always have to be careful. The internet can be a dangerous place.
Safety In The Machine 