Dear Readers, After a somewhat turbulent take-off, several delayed flights, false starts, a crash landing, future visions, a wedding, an SOS and more excruciating metaphors, it appears that this flight is again airborne, assisted by a new Internet Service Provider with more comprehensive network coverage. Yes, it turns out my former provider had not updated the local tower and now customers are flocking to the competitor. The mundane problems of unreliable network connections that may be experienced by any Joanne Blogs on the open frontier of the Blogosphere, and corresponding emotions of uncertainty, frustration and even temporary paranoia or alienation felt by the hapless user, are, it seems, an increasingly familiar part of the new techno-mindscape of communication in cyberspace that global social media communities chatter of. Such experiences can lead to the question: who or what controls users’ use of the internet?
Whilst Jo Blogs may go to her local mall and buy a better connection; for others in the new global Digital Age, access is not so straightforward. On the ‘other’ side of the digital divide are those who do not have access to computer technology, through social and environmental circumstances of poverty, distance, locality, and education level. Behind the scenes, or the screens, in what some researchers term ‘surveillance society’ is regulation. According to a recent research article by Australian law researcher S. Lloyd-Jones in Pacific Journalism Review, communications industry regulation by Internet Service Providers and industry stakeholders, works with governments, in a role that researcher J. Hills terms,‘rough censors’ (Hills, 2006:198). Internet regulation has a comparatively short history, L. Bennet-Moses, another researcher in the field writes: “Technologies such as... computing and the internet, were not designed to evade the law or employ it for gain, but rather were created for independent reasons. Their relationship with the law is not intentional” (Bennett-Moses, 2007:4). Now, as we know, everyone who buys a new mobile device is required to agree to fine print rules of use-although with print so fine it may be hard to read it...
There is a strange paradox to digital writing in social media forms that many users report; writing on a computer, gazing into your words on a screen, produces an illusion of writing in the solitude of your own inner-world, yet the words are globally public. Whereas internet extroverts may delight in the 21st Century prospect of ‘cradle to grave’ observability, it is important, especially for young people and first time users, to remember that this freedom brings an increased, although not necessarily immediately obvious, need for personal responsibility in online behaviour. A thought that suggests the philosophy of Sartre...With freedom comes responsibility... Could it be that the rebirth of millions of authors in virtual reality is also bringing new forms of existentialism into digital writing?
Copyright © Ruth Skilbeck, 2011.
Bennet-Moses, L. (2007) ‘Recurring dilemmas: The law’s race to keep up with technological change.’ [2007] UNSWLRS 21, 18 May 2007: 4.
Hills, J. (2006). ‘What’s new? War, censorship and global transmission: From telegraph to the internet. The International Communication Gazette, 68(3): 195-216.
Lloyd-Jones, S. ‘Where the wild things are: Evolving futures of communication regulation in the current national security context.’ Pacific Journalism Review, Vol 14(2) 2008: 50-72.
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