There are many wonderful things about this brave new world of increasingly cheaper and faster modes of communication. New technologies provide us with the potential to connect smaller communities with larger communities of like-minded souls.
At the same time, there is this feeling that these same modes of communication are also fragmenting groups of people according to niches and special interests. Traditional mass audiences – one that mainstream advertising and big media has used to sell us products and presidents – are splintering.
Control over content on the Internet is, at present, no longer entirely predictable or guaranteed to be authentic. Reliability of content verifiability and veracity is critical.
In fact, the new technologies that allow us to keep connected and expand our communities is much more susceptible to surveillance and tampering from outside, often anonymous sources. Nevertheless, the convergence from analog to digital is well underway; with it, however, comes this present period of sociological adjustment, insecurity, and vulnerability.
It is reasonable to be suspicious of our virtual environments.
With every new opportunity on the Internet for learning and building community, serious challenges emerge. Because the realm of the Internet is a public space, the best and worst of human nature will prevail.
Weblogging or blogging provides an excellent example of how susceptible our emerging communication platform is.
Recently, a teacher who was conducting some research on the Internet contacted me about my blog, which she claims contained pornographic material on it. She discovered my blog during a search and was shocked to find advertisements for male reproductive organ failures and other such things.
Can people hack into a blog and post offensive material without the author’s permission or knowledge?
Yes, unfortunately they can. Absolutely. There are several ways people can manipulate the content of a blog, even if there is the author believes the material to be secure.
One way is to hack around passwords and security, and another way is to use special software that inserts ads and content automatically through a third-party.
According to Kasia Trapszo, a very informed blogger who writes about new technology, “It's most likely that the person visiting your weblog had adware installed on their computer which inserted pornographic ads into the web page.”
This type of pernicious behavior has been around for a while and will clearly accelerate as traditional forms of communication increasingly give way to the online environment.
Although this is obviously an embarrassing situation to be burdened with, there may be some important lessons to be learned.
The socially responsible things to do in this situation are to: (1) not overreact; (2) fix the problem as quickly as possible; and (3) investigate the cause of the problem.
In this case, I sent a note of apology to the teacher, deleted my blog from the Internet completely, and started exploring how these things happen. What I discovered was sobering. Blogs are susceptible to attack and defacement. In this case, my blog became the target of an individual (some malicious cretin) with too much time on their hands.
We live in a world now where data-mining, aggressive advertising, Trojans, dialers, malware, browser hijackers, government surveillance and info-tracking has become part of everyday life. This, unfortunately, is a much darker side to the silver-lined blogging cloud we have come to know. It is a brave new world on the Internet and it is far from risk-free.
Bloggers beware.
Play nice.
Educate.
Happy Holidays.