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You are here: Home > Forum > A Place of Safety > General Talk > The puritanisation of the internet
The puritanisation of the internet  [message #59917] Wed, 02 December 2009 17:08 Go to next message
saben is currently offline  saben

On fire!

Registered: May 2003
Messages: 1537



10 years ago I felt like the internet was a refuge. Somewhere I could be anonymous. Somewhere I could be safe. Somewhere I could pick a handle and talk about anything.

Chat rooms were common, as were forums and funny names as email addresses. Anonymity was one of the internet's prize virtues.

But web 2.0 doesn't offer that. Facebook, Myspace and Twitter. It feels so open. I feel vulnerable. I feel guarded online and no longer want to reveal too much of myself. I feel like search engines are TOO good at finding references to me, my thoughts and my opinions.

The internet still might have seedy corners, but I don't see them. It feels the internet is now public and the puritan culture affecting the western world in real life has spread online. Online used to be different and utilised mainly by geeks or those different from the norm. I feel like it's changed. It's no longer a place to meet people from all over the world as it is a convenient way to stay in touch with people from the "real world", the local world.

Has the internet changed or have my perceptions just changed? Is the internet more safe? Less safe? More private? Less private?



Look at this tree. I cannot make it blossom when it suits me nor make it bear fruit before its time [...] No matter what you do, that seed will grow to be a peach tree. You may wish for an apple or an orange, but you will get a peach.
Master Oogway
Re: The puritanisation of the internet  [message #59919 is a reply to message #59917] Wed, 02 December 2009 17:25 Go to previous messageGo to next message
timmy

Has no life at all
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13739



The internet never was private. That is an illusion.

Every time we use it we leave our IP address wherever we go which, coupled with the date and time, is capable of identifying not our identity, but the identity of the client computer we are using.

If we are using a public computer then other records may well identify us absolutely. If our computer is private then we are 99% identified already.

That has always been the case, always.

Is it more puritan? Well the moralists have learnt how to use it and they have always wanted to control us.

And anonymising services are only as good as the proprietors and their decision about when to stop resisting court orders. Or they may even be run by intelligence agencies.



Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
Re: The puritanisation of the internet  [message #59920 is a reply to message #59919] Wed, 02 December 2009 17:42 Go to previous messageGo to next message
saben is currently offline  saben

On fire!

Registered: May 2003
Messages: 1537



I'm not just talking privacy from "officials". I'm talking privacy from one's work colleagues. Privacy from one's schoolmates. Privacy from one's family.

It feels like there's less of that now than there once was.

And less using channels that were somewhat more secure- like file sharing networks like limewire or mIRC undernet chatrooms. Now it's highly public and profitable websites like facebook.

That's more what I'm talking about.



Look at this tree. I cannot make it blossom when it suits me nor make it bear fruit before its time [...] No matter what you do, that seed will grow to be a peach tree. You may wish for an apple or an orange, but you will get a peach.
Master Oogway
Re: The puritanisation of the internet  [message #59923 is a reply to message #59920] Wed, 02 December 2009 18:07 Go to previous messageGo to next message
timmy

Has no life at all
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13739



But we choose to be on Facebook, for example. And we choose our privacy levels there.



Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
Re: The puritanisation of the internet  [message #59925 is a reply to message #59923] Wed, 02 December 2009 19:31 Go to previous messageGo to next message
saben is currently offline  saben

On fire!

Registered: May 2003
Messages: 1537



I guess so.

But that is like saying we "choose to drive cars" or "choose to see news on TV".

Web 2.0 including Facebook, etc is a cultural revolution. Amongst my generation it's compulsory if one wishes to be a cultural member. Unless one is trying to make a point of being deliberately non-conformist.

The internet has changed. I guess that's my point. And it feels different to how it once was. It feels more about real people and less about handles.

And I find that a bit scary. I liked the anonymity. I felt safer when I was "Saben" and not "Shem".



Look at this tree. I cannot make it blossom when it suits me nor make it bear fruit before its time [...] No matter what you do, that seed will grow to be a peach tree. You may wish for an apple or an orange, but you will get a peach.
Master Oogway
Re: The puritanisation of the internet  [message #59927 is a reply to message #59925] Wed, 02 December 2009 20:32 Go to previous messageGo to next message
timmy

Has no life at all
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13739



I agree about the wonderful feeling of illusory safety. I would miss that too, had I not decided to be out in all senses of the word. I mix my online life FROM here TO the real world, but not the other way around, so I won't be starting a Facebook group for iomfats.org from my real life persona.

I think Facebook and LinkedIn have a place, but it took me a while to like them enough to join them. I know that recruiters check them, and, were I to wish to be recruited, I would have an even stronger LinkedIn profile than I have.

Tim Berners Lee disagrees that Web 2.0 is a real thing, by the way, and I'm pretentious enough to agree with him. It's just a client/server environment with increasingly powerful clients that act as thin clients for almost every task online! Web browsers have improved since the early days, but that is all. Web 2.0 is a marketing slogan, not a reality.

What we have today are chat clients far better than MIRC but without the mystique and cliquiness, browsers far better than Netscape, email clients that handle email well, yes even M$ Outwit, and so much more ease of use. Geeks and nerds have been replaced by mums and grandmas.

And nostalgia is not what it used to be Smile



Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
Re: The puritanisation of the internet  [message #59939 is a reply to message #59927] Wed, 02 December 2009 23:54 Go to previous messageGo to next message
acam is currently offline  acam

On fire!
Location: UK
Registered: July 2007
Messages: 1849



I'm with Saben. I used to feel safe in what I typed and I used to feel that I didn't need to protect myself.

Now, if I answer a questionnaire on facebook it seems to get displayed for all to see. I had to go through deleting stuff the last time I went there.

And I am slightly worried that the picture I posted there will come back to haunt me one day.

But maybe it is just a question of how mainstream it is. When I began with email only (no pictures) it was definitely a geek thing. Then pictures began in (I guess about 1992?) and I downloaded some with my Amstrad portable on a 24K phone connexion.

Now everyone can do it and a surprising number of them do and can find out what I do, even though I don't tell them. I am getting to be outstripped by my 13 year old grandson!

Perhaps I should be glad. Actually I'm not sure I want to be in the open for all to see. There is a wonderful short story called 'Am I blue' about a guy who (given a magic wish) just wishes for all homosexuals to appear blue for just one day. Simply the fact of being unable to hide it made a huge step towards general acceptance of it. It became a bit like being black - who can hide the colour of their skin?

If everyone knew everything about who went to look at what and who read what and who searched for what on the internet then we would be blue for all to see (in effect). Maybe it would be good for us.

I don't hope for it because there are too many unjust laws for anyone of sense to wish for an end to hiding places. It's an interesting idea though.

If everyone who broke a law was immediately known to the police the worst of the unjust laws might be removed sooner!

Love,
Anthony
Re: The puritanisation of the internet  [message #59947 is a reply to message #59939] Thu, 03 December 2009 10:14 Go to previous messageGo to next message
NW is currently offline  NW

On fire!
Location: Worcester, England
Registered: January 2005
Messages: 1558



I find this a very interesting discussion. I think there are a couple of parts to it: the illusion of safety, and the ability to remain anonymous.

I don't think I ever had the illusion of safety on the net. I've been on the net since 1995, just about coinciding with the release of Netscape 2.01 (which is how I can date it - my memory isn't *that* good!). But I never felt especially "safe" or anonymous, and have never really bothered about 95% of that side of things. I guess being physically abused as a kid may have made me realise that any feeling of safety is only temporary and illusory (although both necessary and comforting). And, of course, having already been fully out for well over a decade helped - if only in that I already knew just how much energy it takes to determinedly hide a part of oneself.

Now, as for the ability to remain anonymous. Probably very little is absolutely proof against a determined assault by a government-level detail probe - the kind of brute-force attack they use on terrorist suspects here in the West. But for a reasonable degree of anonymous on-line activity, there are plenty of resources. TOR and Deepnet are examples, and there are, I think, still a couple of anonymous e-mail re-mailers operating. But it all seems so much *effort*. Yes - I have used such facilities on occasion, for damn good reason, where I felt a very high level anonymity was essential.

Which I guess brings us back to "puritanisation". The thing I used maximum anonymity for was when I was coming to grips with a relationship which was - in essence - sexually abusive. Some may remember that my first few postings here were to do with working my way through getting to grips with this, several decades after the event. Yes, I was happy to talk about it here pretty non-anonymously. But trying to find descriptions of and survivors of other such relationships to compare with ... I was not stupid enough to try and research "abused children" in any way that was easily traceable: though now I would feel confident that I could talk (to the police, or any other authority) about my own experiences as a survivor and the need to compare them to other perspectives, I certainly could not have done so then!



"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night devoid of stars." Martin Luther King
Re: The puritanisation of the internet  [message #59949 is a reply to message #59917] Thu, 03 December 2009 14:15 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Macky is currently offline  Macky

Really getting into it
Location: USA
Registered: November 2008
Messages: 973



I think a word about internet safety would be good here.

Yes, don't give your phone number and address to strangers. Don't post a picture of yourself anywhere unless you don't mind it being shared worldwide forever. Everyone's heard those.

But a danger for all, no matter what your age, is the chance of violating the child porn laws. I live in Pennsylvania USA. I've seen some people get into trouble here, because they violated these laws. They might not have even realized the danger they put themselves in.

1. I saw a 40 year old acquaintance on the news, in handcuffs. I knew him when he was a choirboy; he was the head chorister. Apparently he was sexting on the net and it just so happened that the guy on the other side was 15. The boys parents were monitoring his computer and reported the incident to child safety. His case is awaiting trial. The moral here is that sexting is dangerous.

2. 18 people including 3, 15 year old boys were arrested for viewing child pornography on the web. I can recall back when I was 15 and I know if there were good pictures of other boys my age, by damn, I'd have to see them. I can't help but feel that any 15 year old gay boy's hormones would take him directly to such pictures. However, the kids were arrested together with the old pervs that viewed the material. Yes, that's sick. I agree. But it's the way the law's being interpreted.

3. What goes for the web also goes for smart phones. I read a story about a couple of local high school kids who were arrested for distributing a clip of one of their sex acts via phone. Were these kids stupid or just uninformed?

This whole mess is a minefield. Definitions of porn are so nebulous, that it sometimes is difficult to tell if you are breaking the law. There is no way to check if any web site is truly free of illegal content. Personally, if a web site starts to look a bit suspicious to me, I leave.

I think this would be a good discussion item. That is; safety on the web. And not just for the younglings. I think that this is something that we all need to be careful about.

Macky



Behold, how good and how pleasant it is
For brothers to dwell together in unity!
Ps 133:1 NASB
"Only miscreants worry about net privacy" - Google CEO  [message #60127 is a reply to message #59917] Thu, 10 December 2009 15:00 Go to previous messageGo to next message
timmy

Has no life at all
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13739



The headline tells us quite a lot about the brain bandwidth available in Mahogany Row in Google.

I make no apology for linking it to another news article in my blog at http://timtrent.blogspot.com/2009/12/only-miscreants-worry-about-net-privacy.html

Google has now gone to the Dark Side.



Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
Re: The puritanisation of the internet  [message #60136 is a reply to message #59917] Thu, 10 December 2009 19:02 Go to previous message
Deeej is currently offline  Deeej

Needs to get a life!
Location: Berkshire, UK
Registered: March 2005
Messages: 3281



Saben said,
>Online used to be different and utilised mainly by geeks or those different from the norm. I feel like it's changed.

It's certainly changed. It used to be something used by a tiny minority, and you could generally judge something of a person's character and social status simply by their presence. Nowadays it's gone from a specialist medium to a utility -- just as you can't judge anything by the fact that he uses a telephone, you can't tell anything about a person just because he has an email address (unless it's a particularly unusual one).

To be honest, it's not something that's really affected me much. I started out (at the age of 11 or so) as just an Internet 'user'. As I've got older I've become more and more technical, and whenever there's been a major change in the way people approach the Internet I've viewed it first in terms of the underlying technology -- which makes it easier for me to regard the social implications as secondary. Also, my choice of career means I'm always in touch with the sort of people prevalent on the Internet a few years ago. They haven't gone, they've just been obscured by the mass of others. Facebook, Twitter, Myspace etc. are not useful for finding new people, only catching up with people you already know, because there's no common interest tying together the users of the sites. But there are still lots of (in fact, more than there ever have been) specialist sites like this one for people with particular interests. Although I'd agree you need to look harder to find them because of all the spam and rubbish that other people are churning out all the time.

Privacy? Well, as Tim has pointed out, there is and always has been very little privacy, unless you work hard to achieve it through technical means. The privacy you used to feel you had was largely because the Internet was a niche, and the typical internet user was uninterested in prying into the personal details of others -- although many could if they wanted to. Now that it's massive, suddenly private data is big business, to companies, scammers and governments alike, and everyone's much more conscious of their exposure.

David
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