This is not your usual article about the Internet. It's not about the hottest tips, nor is it about the coolest sites. Instead, it's about commonsense, integrity and effort.
You see, these virtues are three of the best tools you can have at your disposal when you venture online. In fact, good doses of each are almost essential if you want to avoid the virtual pitfalls that are woven throughout the Web and the rest of the Internet. And pitfalls there are aplenty: sex, lies, rumours, deceptions, scams and a multitude of other abuses.
In perspective
Before we get into the seamy side of the Net, let's start with an anti-warning: the Internet is a terrific invention. It expands our reach and our horizons in a way rarely experienced in history, as did the printing press and the invention of the telegraph. Like Keats' first reading of Chapman's Homer, contact with the Internet can inspire awe: "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies, When a new planet swims into his ken". If you haven't yet experienced the type of amazement and delight on the Internet that makes you wax lyrical, then you probably haven't even scratched the surface of what's available to you.
As you contemplate the dangers of the Net, it's important to keep in mind that the vast bulk of the information and people you'll encounter there are at worst innocuous and at best enriching.
The Internet is also terrific in the original sense of that word: inspiring terror. The Net develops at a pace that outstrips the ability of lawmakers, sociologists, ethicists, psychologists, educators and parents to keep up; the huge pool of information it places at our fingertips comes to us as an unfiltered mass, with few signposts to tell us how to separate fact from fiction from fantasy; and it is just as accessible to those who are criminal and dishonest as it is to the law-abiding and true.
Types of abuse
Most of the nasty side of the Net falls into six, overlapping categories:
- Misinformation: rumours, lies, unsubstantiated claims.
- Deceptions: misrepresentation, hoaxes.
- Invasions of privacy: misuse of information, spam, personal databases, e-mail address harvesters.
- Offensive material: pornography, violence.
- Extremists: cults, hate sites.
- Criminal activities: scams, fraud, stalking.
All of this is old hat for the human race. The difference with such human behaviour on the Internet is that the technology makes some forms of deceit and abuse much easier to perpetrate and much harder to trace.
Junk mail, to take one of the more trivial examples, becomes far harder to tame when it takes the form of spam—junk e-mail. Let your e-mail address fall into the hands of a single dedicated bulk e-mailer and you can quickly find yourself overwhelmed with unwanted correspondence. Even worse, if you have your own Web site that includes a contact e-mail address you may become the prey of e-mail address harvesters who gather such contact addresses and then sell their lists to others. This opens your inbox to e-mail from pornographers, multi-level marketers and other undesirables.
Technological solutions
One way to combat spam and the other forms of abuse is to up the technical ante.
If junk e-mailers use programs to advance their cause, then you can fight them by using e-mail filters, mail address encryption, and multiple mailboxes. The same goes for other types of online abuse. For instance, if you shop online and the goods aren't delivered or are misrepresented, you can use online reporting agencies to spread the word about the e-store that defrauded you.
There are numerous software tools and resources available to help you fight spam, pornography, hate sites, and invasions of privacy (see the related article entitled Online Privacy & Safety Resources for a sampling). You'll find many of these resources well worth using.
There are, however, a couple of disadvantages to fighting technological fire with technological fire.
Firstly, it's an upward spiral: the techno-miscreants are often on the cutting edge of technology, so you'll find your defensive maneuvers being flanked by new developments. Spammers, for instance, are continually finding new ways to circumvent being traced and filtered out.
Secondly, such resources are not infallible and, indeed, may have their own negative effects. Take, for example, blocking software used to prevent children from browsing to "undesirable" sites. The problem with such software is that "undesirable" is not an objective term: what the blocking software developers regard as worth censoring may be, in your estimation, perfectly acceptable. For instance, the sex categories of two well-known filtering products provide very different filtering effects: one defines such sites as specifically excluding "sexual preference, sexual health, breast cancer, or sexually transmitted diseases" while the other specifically includes such sites.
Thirdly, a knee-jerk reliance on technological solutions often means we fail to explore more basic, personal solutions.
Human solutions
That brings us back to our starting point: many of the problems you'll encounter on the Internet can be solved using personal rather than technological tools.
How? Check out the ideas and guidelines in the related articles Families online, Safety and privacy, Online relationships and Sifting misinformation. You'll also find a useful collection of links in Online Privacy & Safety Resources.
All that's needed to implement these suggestions is commonsense, a bit of effort and the exercise of integrity. With those three tools you can go a long way towards cutting through all of the deceit and abuse and make your time online a wonderful adventure.