Blog 11-Third Entry -The Dangers

This portion of my web essay will be accessible by clicking on the link marked: The Dangers. This portion is currently in progress, because I am working on obtaining news articles as examples, without a fee.

The Dangers
The internet provides children with access to a vast amount of information. However, this access comes at a price. There are dangers that also come with this access.

Child pornography is one of the fastest growing businesses online. The number of domains is also growing: In 2004, 3433 child abuse domains were found by the Internet Watch Foundation. In 2006, they had found 10656 child abuse domains. Child pornography has become a $ 3 billion annual industry.

Blog 10- Second Entry- What's Changing???

The purpose of this entry which will be found when clicking the link named:What's Changing???

What's Changing???

The purpose of this portion is to illustrate the changes in internet activity among pret teens and teenagers and also to show how much more accessible the internet is to children.In 2003, the percentage of children having access to the internet was 56 percent. Three years later in 2006, the percentage increased to 93 percent. It is evident that children are becoming more aware on how to use computers, and more importantly on how to use the internet. Websites geared for pre-teens and teens have become more interactive. On these websites, they can play games, participate in online quizzes, and even interact with other members of the website. In April 2006 a survey was conducted by www.emarketer.com , to see what children are doing online (ages 9-14).

-Looking up information for school/homework was even with playing online games at 66 percent.
-Read/send email at 41 percent
-Use instant messenger at 36 percent
-Using social networks ( like Myspace), 17 percent

From these statistics, it is obvious teens are interacting with each other online.

Young teens between the ages of eight and fourteen make up 60 percent of internet users aged under eighteen years of age. Between the years 2006 and 2010 internet use between children ages 8 to 11 will increase from 67.1 percent to 71.4 percent. Use among young teens, ages 12 to 14 will increase 74.3 percent to 84.7 percent.

Blog 9 - Introduction- First Entry for Web Essay

This particular portion will appear when you first view the web essay, the introduction, so to speak.I wanted to keep this portion short because my objective is just to give an intro and clearly state the purpose of the web essay. I wantedmost of the information to remain on the other pages accessible to the user by links. I also did not want the reader to lose interest by overdoing the introduction.


RESEARCH QUESTION: How is the internet changing the future in the subject of child abduction?

Child abduction is defined as the kidnapping of a child or baby by an older person (definition taken from wikipedia). Every year there are about 800,000 children reported missing. Of the 800,000 children , approximately 69,000 are abducted. In this technological age, more efforts have been concentrated on helping locate these missing or abducted children by using the internet as a resource. My goal for this web essay is to help make users aware of the changing future in child abduction: the optimistic efforts, and the dangers as well.

Reflection on MySpace Suicide

Ultimately, what happened to Megan Meier was a tragedy. However, I dont think anything can be done legally. It's sad but true. How do you regulate the internet? Because the Drews and the other parties involved did not physically harm Megan Meier, there can be nothing done legally. It doesn't excuse the fact that to taunt and "verbally attack" this child was wrong, but there is nothing to be done legally.

Reflection 2

Reading the Friend Game by Lauren Collins was interesting. It was also somewhat disturbing. The thought of adults being behind and supporting that kind of behavior is unbelieveable. Teens fight, and sometimes these fights get dramatic, but in no way should what happened to Megan Meier be condoned in any way. What the Drews did was very cruel and it puts a negative outlook online communitites like MySpace. But in that case, what could MySpace have possibly done to prevent this from happening? Perhaps they might ask for a form of identification when opening an account. being that myspace valuse privacy, would that be an invasion of privacy? In this case, the people that were involved should have thought clearly and carefully about what they were doing instead of plating with the mind and emotions of such a fragile CHILD. The point of adults condoning this behavior towards a child is baffling to me.

Reflection 1

I enjoyed watching the Disney video on YouTube.What a creative idea! and the thought behind it was very clever. The irony of it all is a movie like that is actually legally protected. The issue of copyright is quite controversial. From how long a copyright lasts to what can be copyriighted, it's very tricky! Because people are always having new ideas and from those ideas other ideas emerge, I believe copyright is something that is always going to be changing.

Website Layout

The layout I will most likely be using is the partial network structure type. By using this layout, users will be able to navigate to where they want to go in my essay, and not necessarily follow chronological order. This particular layout is also beneficial because i can link the organizations that i mention in my essay into my website, so that users can access these sites, if desired.

As far as the section titles, I don't have a concrete title names just yet, but I wanted to go with a little something like this:

On the main page, I would like to do a brief introduction on the purpose of my essay. I'll keep it to a short paragraph, as the tutorial says, "Keep it simple"! It will talk about the influence of the internet on child abduction. I hope to cover and what my goal is for making this site.

The different sections I am thinking about doing is:

Section #1- The content on this page will address the potential threats posed to children on the internet. There are news articles, where I will draw some of my information from, and these articles will be linked on that page.

Section #2-

Wikipedia Entry

My Wikipedia username is Maracot. Unfortunately, I have been away for Spring Break and was not able to post and monitor my entry before coming back, but i have posted it, and so far, its still there :)

It can be found here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_abduction

and the my contribution was the portion title Child abduction and the Internet. What i wrote is as follows:
Child abduction and the Internet

The internet has become both a danger and an aid in the subject of child abduction. It is a place where online predators can communicate with potential victims. 1 in 25 youth receive sexual solicitations that included attempts to contact the youth offline.[2]

Because of the threat these predators pose, there have also been efforts to use the internet as a resource to prevenchild abduction or to help the families of those who have been abducted.

Organizations have set up websites where uers can go to gain knowledge or contribute help to stopping child abduction. Among these are the organizations Enough is Enough and National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which have partnered with the online community Myspace to help keep the internet a safe place for children. In addtion to donating new database technology to Sentinel Tech[3] that enables websites to locate, remove and block convicted sex offenders, Myspace is also a sponsor of Enough Is Enough 's Internet Safety 101:Empowering Parents Program.

Myspace also features pages and groups dedicated to helping find missing children.

In external links, I also added the links for Enough is enough and National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Hopefully my addition stays up there, but if it doesn't I have learned from this experience that the information that we put on the internet is very important because it is viewable by anyone. Which is why wikipedia takes entries so seriously, and has strict guidelines for what can be posted.

Wikipedia Assignment

Since the focus of my research project is how the internet has changed child abduction and how the internet helps find missing children, I thought that focusing on a popular networking website, like Myspace might be beneficial.

Currently on Wikipedia, Myspace is comprised of about 17 headings explaining thoroughly what the website is about. I plan to add a heading to the entry, particularly under Child Safety. I am not quite sure what I'm going to title the heading yet. Probably something along the lines of Myspace and Missing Children. The sources I will use for my entry will be news articles found on the internet explaining partnerships and what Myspace has done to help make the networking websites, like itself, or the internet in general,be a safer place for children.

For example, Myspace and Sentinel Tech donated new database technology to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to help with their online safet investigations. The article is available on the website for The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. I have included the link:http://www.missingkids.com/missingkids/servlet/NewsEventServlet?LanguageCountry=en_US&PageId=3045

Myspace has also formed a partnership with a non profit organization called Enough is Enough, whose main priority is to make the internet safer for children. They deal with child pornography, child stalking, and sexual predation on the internet. The article is available on the organization's website:http://www.enough.org/inside.php?id=13BGG1DG8


I am still getting the hang of the posting process on Wikipedia though, but I'm sure I'll get it! :)

Research Plans

For this project I am planning to do something that involves the internet (internet communities, missing children websites) and missing children cases. Although I do not have a specific research question yet, I plan to investigate what is being done on the internet to help find missing children, but also how the internet helps pedophiles and other online predators locate victims.

In my research, I hope to show the efforts that are being made by online communities and internet users to help find these missing children, I hope to show the progress of these efforts.

Information that I need to gather would be to find sites on online communities dedicated to missing children. I've found a couple on myspace and there are groups that you can join, but I definitely will search for more

examples:
http://www.myspace.com/theyneedyourhelp
http://www.myspace.com/helpfindkids

and I have also found a helpful website dedicated to internet safety for children:http://www.enough.org/

On the Website it talks about a partnership with myspace and district attorneys to help keep kids safe online.

I will be looking for more websites and looking through news articles to find cases of missing children that are linked to online encounters.

POTENTIAL RESEARCH QUESTIONS: My topic deals with how the internet helps find missing children on the internet, but also how some have gone missing because of encounters on the internet..

I HAVE POSTED SOME RESEARCH QUESTIONS:

How is the internet changing the future of child abduction?
What is being done to stop online predators from abducting children on the internet?
Are websites for missing children effective?
Contrary to helping the cause to find missing children, the internet also increases the amount of access that online predators have to finding potential victims. What can be done about that?

Topic and Descripton

Originally I wanted to write about the topic of locative narratives, but instead opted to go with another topic.

With many online communities available (Myspace, Facebook, etc.), communication worldwide has become almost effortless. The internet is effective at connecting people, but also there are children that go missing because of pedophiles using the internet to connect to them. Internet communities help you find who is in your town, or who is in any town. On myspace, there are groups dedicated to finding missing children. There are also websites that help alert the public for missing children. On http://www.amw.com/, it keeps the public updated on whether there are any amber alerts. They also have archives where you can search for cases of missing people as well as captures. On The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children website, they offer resources for parents as well as give you the option to be able to help and get involved.

It's an interesting topic because thousands of children go missing everyday.So the internet becomes both a positive and negative.It can be used to help find missing children but it can also be a cause of them.

On http://www.wired.com/, there was an article telling about how an online predator was planning to use Myspace to meet underage boys.

The link is :http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/10/71948

But where can online communities draw the line to keep out online predators? Is it possible? What can be done?

There would be many users that I would potentially be writing for. Mostly concerned adults, or anyone concerned about the dangers the internet poses (as far as online predators).

Johnson-Eilola 1-20

In this reading, Johndan Johnson-Eilola brought up some interesting points. He starts off the article by posing a question about who websites are written for. That is an interesting question that we never really take the time to think about. Because the internet is so accesible as far as information and who can obtain it, I believe that a website is written for whoever is willing to look it up. He illustrates this point by giving an example of a student who logs into her university's website in order to locate information. She has trouble locating the information and he points out that when the website was created, she was not the user that the creator specifically had in mind.

I also liked the point Johnson-Eilola makes about a website not being a document that is read, but used. Therefore, we are not readers of a website rather users, because we engage with what is in front of us (use links, navigate through the website).

There are three crucial issues of websites:

Usability- who views this site? and what are they going to do with the information?

Structure- linking the sections where users can go on the site.

Navigation- crucial to structure, this is the "how and what" to use to move from one part pf a website to another.

Knowing these three things makes sure your site is effective and fulfills its purpose.

Johndan JOhnson-Eilola ends the article by bringing up the topic of print vs. online texts. He compares the navigation through a print text (reading the pages line to line and turning pages) to navigating through text on the website. There were interesting comparisons like how we read words on a page when they are in a book, but when a website is too text heavy we tend to lose interest. The issue of print vs. online is an interesting topic that is relevant to this course. It often comes up in our class discussions and I'm interested to see what will happen to print media as technology becomes more advanced.

Response to fan fiction websites

Summary: Rheingold "Smart Mobs"

Howard Rheingold starts off this interesting article by talking about the overthrow of Filipino President Joseph Estrada in 2001 by a smart mob. Concerned citizens sent text messages to people telling them to meet a certain avenue wearing black. More than a million citizens showed up eventually leading to the overthrow of the president. Appropriately named "generation text", people converged together and made a change through technology. However, text messaging was prevalent amongst filipinos even before the overthrow of Estrada, dating back to 1995 (SMS).

Professor Vicente Rafael of the University of California in San Diego makes an interesting point that while Filipinos are technologically updated in communication, other aspects of life in the Phillippines are deteriorating; much like the government, overrun by corruption. In the instance of the overthrow of Estrada, Rheingold says that the crowd became a medium, furthermore they became the actual technology,sending the message so quickly to each other.He talks about netwar being both violent or non-violent. The term netwar was coined by John Arguilla and David Ronfeldt. The term describes the paradoxical differences of the uses of networking (the bright and dark sides). Netwar is commonly used, even by the U.S. military.

Alexis de Tocqueville made an interesting point about 19th century Americans concerning information exchange. The most informed share new information with the public. at first out of duty, but eventually by choice, becoming a routine for the benefit of all. This could be said about smart mobs and peer to peer journalism. Smart mobs can bring people together with similar interests, some even alerting you when someone is in your vicinity at the moment (lovegety, imahima, match making services), while others like Upoc, based in Manhattan, served as an effective communicator during the attacks of 9/11. Consequently, this is what information exchange has become about, in order to share knowledge with others for the benefit of all.

Summary: Glister "Digital Literacy"

Paul Glister begins his article by illustrating that with the development of codex, pages could be turned rather than unscrolling papyrus. The process of locating information was changed because it became easier to access particular points of the reading by just turning pages. This can also be seen when accessing information using the internet versus using printed media. When using the internet, you can simply search for a particular quote or phrase in a printed work using a search engine, where as if you were looking through the actual print version it could take quite a while to find it amongst the pages. There are differences in digital literacy as far as internet space and print space. Internet space, being interactive, is easily changeable, and is not monitored by a specific person. Print space on the other hand is more complicated to alter after a work is published. The content of print space is also mediated by editors before a work is published.

He also talks about a paradigm shift. This illustrates the difference between reading something in print and reading the same thing on a computer, the newspaper for example. The internet is more inclusive, anfd you can choose what to search for. Whereas in print, it is more exclusive and the content is unchangeably there, leavingt you with a fixed index and limited resources.

The internet, constantly changing,gives us the ability to connect to other people and other places, but more importantly gives us the option to constantly change our options. This is especially helpful in today's time wheninformation excahnge occurs so rapidly.

Summaries

Summary: Benjamin Woolley's "Cyberspace"

In reading Benjamin Woolley’s article “Cyberspace”, he attempts to define the term cyberspace without actually giving it a clear definition. He gives details on how it became important in the 1980’s in data exchange worldwide. He also describes the development of the internet and how it originated from something called ARPAnet.There is also a comparison of the human nervous system to technology. He compares the phenotype of a human to a “phenotype” of a website, being the outward appearance and the genotype being the genetic code (DNA) of a human or codes (HTML) of a website. He also makes comparisons of a computer virus and a biological virus, pointing out that in both instances the strand of code replicates itself in the host, infecting it. Just as a biological virus affects a person's health, a computer virus could ultimately affect what happens in the global community in cyberspace. The outcome of the virus then causes changes in the real world. He concludes the article by stating that becoming a member of cyberspace is unavoidable and poses the question of whether cyberspace is the new reality.


Summary: Michael Heim "VR 101"

The idea of cyberspace being the new reality brings up another point:virtual reality. The internet has become so real that it can change physical things in life. In Michael Heim's article, "VR 101", he describes virtual reality by using three I's: immersion, interaction, and information intensity. Immersion meaning being actually there and being able to use your senses and feel that you're actually there. Interaction being networking and rapid exchange of data. Information intensity being the varied connections between our perceptions and the real world (creating telepresence). He lists different types of virtual reality:

telepresence- ranging from low telepresence (a telephone call,limited only to voice) to virtual environment research (simulated environments, where all senses are immersed in the experience).

helmets (HMD)-a headmounted device that tracks the wearer's position, connecting to the computer so that it can generate the appropriate responses.

The Cave- similar to the helmet, but tracks head and hand movements. However it is surround screen, surround sound, and projection-based using 3-d computer graphics that completely surrounds the user.

In describing the forms of virtual reality, it is clear that the goal is to form immediacy. This means giving the user the maximum experience by incorporating the three I's, and stimulating all the senses and giving that desired effect of "really being there".


Summary: Bolter & Grusin "Remediation"

In "Remediation", a form of virtual reality is described by describing an event in a movie. "The wire" from the movie "Strange Days" is similar to virtual reality in the sense that it gives you immediacy or the feeling of really being there.Bolter & Grusin make point out that older electronic media and print media are trying to compete with digital media. However, they go on to explain that both are dependent on each other. For example a novel(print media) being remediated would be turned into a movie (electronic media).They explain that remediation did not come about with the development of digital media, but can be found centuries ago. Using a painting from the seventeenth century to illustrate the point that the goal of technology is immediacy, stating that even in the painting the goal is to put the viewer in the same space as the objects viewed, denying the medium; much like the goal of virtual reality. They then give a more current example by indicating how much money and time moviemakers spend to give u the maximum viewing experience.

Differences of Writing in Cyberspace

I think that writing in cyberspace is significantly different from writing in meat-space. Whereas writing in the real world is usually done to generate some type of response, when writing on cyberspace, often this response is almost immediate. With the use of blogs, instant messaging, email,etc. communication time is rapidly reduced. As far as the criteria for "good" writing on cyberspace as opposed to writing in the real world, I supposed there would be differences as well, because it can be accesed by anyone as opposed to writing a letter for a specific person. Also, the way we use certain types of "im talk" (for example:"lol", "brb", etc.)