Web 2.0 is a tricky concept to define. Often the definition is so vague that it covers most parts of our web. Wikipedia mentions “clean URL” and “CSS usage” as important proporties of a web 2.0 site. Would you consider any such page a web 2.0 wonder? Point is, web 2.0 is hard if possible to define. Two keywords I came up with when looking at famous web 2.0 sites though are involvement and exposure. A large portion of the web 2.0 site I’ve come across is based around the concept of encouraging people to put their life and others on display. People are bloging to share their opinions, uploading videos of their personal life on Youtube and displaying party pictures on Flickr.
That’s all great when seeing it as broadening our ways of communication but I think we are increasingly becoming more and more oblivious to the privacy we once held so high. What happened with that? People are taking close to naked pictures of themselves and posting them on the internet just to get acknowledgement. I would be quite surprised if the same person spread flyers with the same pictures at school. Same thing with videos when people post small clips picturing themselves doing the most idiotic things just to get a few seconds of celebricy. Do people really feel that anonymous on the internet that they can separate themselves from their offline personalities? I don’t expect people to be paranoid loners but I don’t expect them to be schizophrenic either.
Aside from reality TV and all it’s trends, I think the numerous web 2.0 sites themselves are partly to blame for this. It encourages people, minors, to do stuff without grasping the consequences. A example from discussions I’ve had is the risk of exposure. When one person posts a picture or video of another person doing something embarassing that moment is going to be broadcasted all over the world. It is no longer contained to a joke for your friends or even a single school but the whole world. Even if the person depicted give his/her consent, is he/she fully aware of the consequences? A sad example is the swedish kid Anton Maiden (fake name) who commited suicide after recieving spiteful reactions to his Iron Maiden covers from people all over the internet. Anton had a crappy voice but he enjoyed singing playback to Iron Maiden and posting recordings on the internet for anybody to download. Some people thought of it as a joke and laughed at him while others projected their hete towards him for “making fun” of their favourite band. However Anton was sincere with his recordings and hurt to the point of suicide from peoples comments, letters and phonecalls(!).
Is it society’s matter to stop these kinds of additions to the internet? Ofcourse not. It’s impossible to stop since it’s allready too late the moment a video/picture/mp3 etc is posted. But even if it were possible, I don’t believe it is the government’s responsability to decide what is potentially harmfull to post on the internet nor is it their job to interfer with peoples own free decisions. It is their job however to inform people of the risks and show people what might happen. With the growing web 2.0 people are more exposed than ever before. It is time people realised that their offline person is the same as the online one.
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