This news is about a father of four, who has worked as an IT manager for more than 15 years decided to set up a “safer” children social network. He did this because of he was quite concern who is actually playing, chatting, communicating with his 4 children. According to Mr. Dance (the father), "As a parent myself I know the concerns about people using fake identities to befriend children on social networking sites."
It could be understandable that the aim of Mr. Dance that he wanted to provide a safer social network for the children. Some people might think he is being over-protective, the news makes me think about one of the very important concepts in this course after reading this news, that is, the online/offline identity. Teenagers from all over the world are addicted to the social network in the contemporary society. There was a survey stated that for the younger teenagers, there are more girls use social network as a tool to communicate with friends then that of boys; for the same age group of boys, they tend to use the social network as a way to flirt with the others. However, do the teenagers really know who is chatting with them? There are always news about the teens were deceived by “net-friends”, date them go out and rape them or ask for money. Everyone could use a faked name, age, gender, profile picture to set up an account in the social network. In this case, the online and offline identity of this people is not the same. Even if someone who use different online and offline identities without doing something bad to the others, there could be a chaos of IDENTITIES.
Moreover, since no one could ensure one’s identity is true or not in the cyber world, what the parents concern is needed. What is more important is that there are no laws to protect the online users in many ways. For example, from the reading “A Rape in Cyberspace”, one of the female players was annoyed by some “dirty wordings”, for example, “eat your own pubic hair!” which typed by another player. The female player was being hurt, however, the law in the real world could not help much.
To prevent those children who are too young (since the safer social network is designed for who is under 18) from being cheated by some bad guys, although it might be related to some issues about privacy or controlling the children, I do think that it might be a nice invention for the parents.
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