Not Computing...?

I've learned some serious lessons in the last 24 hours.

First of all, the Internet is a very delicate and frightening place. There are far too many people willing to post pictures of themselves naked in places where just anyone could stumble across them. Don't get me wrong, the human body is beautiful thing regardless of shape or size, but as an 18 year old I have the experience and maturity to come to that conclusion. An eight year old does not. Nor do most 14 year olds, for that matter.

And nobody should be exposed to such sexually explicit content without warning.

Furthermore, the potentially questionable content posted to the Internet needs to be given serious consideration by whoever is making the post. Who are your readers? What are the consequences of such material being associated with you?

Believe me, I'm all for freedom of expression and free speech, and I take censorship with a sizeable grain of salt. But rights always come with responsibilities.

Secondly, I strongly advise against making blog posts or tweets or facebook statuses or whatever when in an impulsive mood or unstable emotional state. The Internet is a vortex of permanency - once something is up there, there is no guaranteed way to remove it.

I've written some pretty awful things for fanfiction.net (yes, I've wandered that dark valley) but the shoddy writing of my 15 year old self pale in comparison to the verbal, emotional, and psychological bashing that people dish out on a fairly regular basis. No one is likely to go searching for a poorly constructed story that I wrote, and have since removed. If they did, I'm sure it could be located with relative ease - provided the right programs were at hand. The only result of that would be some amusement on the reader's part, and some embarrassment for me.

But insults, hurt feelings, and threats are impossible to erase. Once seen, they cannot be unseen, and are rarely forgotten.

There are no closed doors with the Internet. What we post is, inevitably, viewable by all, and not all that we post is appropriate.

Nor does the fact that it's "just the Internet" excuse anything we make available to other users. You wouldn't walk around downtown Edmonton (or wherever) completely naked. Why? Because it's a public place, obviously.

Then what makes you think it is appropriate to display yourself so casually over the Internet, a place equally as (if not more so) public?

People have committed suicide over things posted via the Internet, whether with hurtful intentions or not. Lives are ruined, and sometimes the shield of anonymity that the screen provides is little comfort when faced with the fact that the person on the other end knows exactly who their attacker is.

Another thing to consider is that, regardless who we really are, people who are not personally known to us (and by "personally" I mean have actually met in the physical world) are quick to make judgments of our character through what we make available to them through the Internet. Predators are everywhere, and the Internet is the ultimate of back-alleys. Never mind saying something unflattering about your ex boyfriend on facebook... some of what you post can put you in a potentially dangerous situation, without you ever knowing.

Profile pictures would be a lot different if all the 13 year-olds taking pictures of themselves in their bathroom mirrors knew that somewhere, there was potentially a pedophile looking at those very same photos, this exact moment.

Or would they?

Somehow we seem to have the mentality that because the Internet is so impersonal, that the screen is only a one-way path, and that what we do has no real consequence.

In the virtual world, when will reality start to compute?   

CopyWrite

The following is a YouTube video pertaining to Canada's copyright laws. The speakers in the video are published authors (as I hope to be one day) and are expressing their concerns about the effect that Bill C-32 will have on them personally, and as a collective group of individuals.

While I wholeheartedly feel that teachers need to be able to have access to material, and that we should not be limited in the number of copies we make, I am also of the opinion that writers need to be recognized for their work. Words have changed the world, have inspired people, and are an important resource for education. Students and teachers alike need access to these materials - these books, magazines, poems, short stories - so that the minds of the future may be nourished.

But the creators need the credit.

The distribution of literature without credit is much the same as downloading music for free, though without the benefits of exposure. A lot of work, effort, time (and believe it or not, money) is put into the writing and publication of a book. If authors are not given due recognition for their labour, they will have little motivation to continue writing so that their work can, essentially, be stolen.

Copyright is for the producer as much as the consumer, but in our consumer-market mentality, I think this is a fact often forgotten.

Musicians, artists, film-makers and photographers have been given recognition with this bill, why haven't writers?     
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qrcNksj5DE