NetAlert: Be afraid, be very afraid
In the recent three-part South Park episode ‘Imaginationland’ terrorists hijack our imagination seeking to eliminate the ‘good parts’, leaving only the ugly, evil and malicious creations of the human mind. This story provides an interesting reference point when considering the increased security measures today, such as the introduction of NetAlert in Australia, which is ‘part of the Australian Government’s ongoing commitment to providing a safe online environment for all families, especially children.’ NetAlert is a project that provides free internet content filter for download and general advice about protecting yourself and your children online. It comes as a response to increased fears of children being exposed to potentially disturbing and harmful material online, fuelled by almost daily reports of child sex offences, lurking paedophiles and easily accessible graphic pornography.
continue reading Uros Cvoro's text
posted by speech at
11:47 AM
2 Comments:
This is so well realised.
When my children were small I was often panicked about pedophilia, protecting them and their innocence. There are so many TV shows and alerts about its danger. In France Sarkozy has proposed building a special prison to protect the people from child molesters. However varying figures estimate that between 70-90% of child abuse takes place within the trusted family circle not outside on the streets that are represented as so dangerous.
I agree we are murdering our society with false, unsupportable ideas of our innocence. Australia has a per capita carbon footprint 5 times higher than that of China. We used to have a society that was mobile, changing and self aware in terms of knowledge and self-knowledge. Has that gone forever now?
Myspace and Facebook certainly bring to surface an interesting mode of social interaction. It is not merely the opportunity for mass-exhibitionism that seems to have the users transfixed, but the ability to pick and choose how one presents themselves, and in doing so create a means of empirically categorizing one's self into a series of simple subheadings: 'Music', 'Interests' etc. In designing a profile the users are in fact redesigning themselves, cutting out all the 'bad' bits, and creating an ideal simulacrum of an artificial individual modeled upon the leftover traces. Indeed despite the fact that the product of this categorization and order is tremendously inhuman, it does seem interesting how organizations such as Myspace and NetAlert demonstrate our cultural yearning for this level of mechanistic control.
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