Plus ca change

Imagine a new, exciting piece of technology with risks understood by those close to it but that can even cause death for an enthusiastic user whose lack of experience and understanding lead them to take risks that the more informed would view with horror. The Internet? Well actually no, it’s the railway which in 1830 at the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway saw William Huskisson MP leave his train at a water stop to walk back along the line to speak to the Duke of Wellington only to be hit and killed by the famous locomotive Rocket on the other line.

The point of this? I would argue that new technologies in which new users have no experience cause them to do things that are later seen as dangerous, even extraordinary. Sometimes these risks cannot even be recognised as present. Perhaps this is because risk is something taught to us by a previous generation whose experience and understanding was in turn developed by yet another generation. With technological innovation these generations do not exist.

Anyone who has ever tried to organise an information giving meeting about staying safe online with a conspicuous lack of success could be forgiven for thinking that people don’t care. I believe that people don’t have a background to recognise its importance.

What can we teach people when we have a captive audience like, for instance, in school? Unless there is a specific problem relating to a particular application, website or social network I’d avoid the huge task of addressing each one and instead I’ll suggest ten aspects that might be common to each one. With technological development accelerating, some might say like a brakeless bicycle without, one hopes, the same consequences, focussing on the product becomes impossible; there’ll be another one along in a minute.

Each of the ten interrelated key features should be overlaid by consideration of the vocabulary we use. We use the same words in vastly different circumstances. A good example is ‘friend’. Once we might put our number of friends in single figures, now in social networks they might number hundreds but with hugely different characteristics; we might never have actually met some of them. This use of the same vocabulary in new situations is amusingly and accurately demonstrated in the film ‘Can I Be Your Friend?’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDycZH0CA4I&t=14s

The key features are listed here:

• Personal information
• Control of information
• Permanence
• Scale
• Separation of online and offline (Not face to face)
• Trust
• Anonymity
• Instant gratification
• Secret vs Private
• Personal behaviour

I haven’t developed a hierarchy for these items but it might help to start with something that will concern anyone who’s ever had one of those calls out of the blue about PPI, access to personal information. Other people knowing who you are and a huge range of personal details such as life history and preferences is nothing new. It’s impossible to spend time in someone’s company without picking up some of this information so what’s the problem? It relates to scale, the number of people to whom it is available online, and the ease with which it can be passed on even inadvertently. It relates to trust in the people who read it and the separation of the online and the offline if people share things online that they would never consider sharing offline.

What is it safe to share and what might the consequences be if it falls into the hands of someone you can’t trust, the online version of stranger danger? Incidentally, if you ever have the chance ask a group of young people if they’ve been given the advice by someone close to them not to talk to strangers. Probably all the hands will go up, an example of familiar safe behaviour being passed on from generation to generation. Then ask them to keep their hands up if they’ve never talked to someone online they haven’t met, perhaps while playing a game. You’ll get knocked over by the rush of air as the hands come down. They talk without thinking about it to people they don’t know online – strangers. Has this to do with an unwarranted confidence in not being physically close to that person?

In any event as well as unwanted contact mentioned above personal information about location can be used to determine when someone’s property is empty, for instance an enthusiastic post about an impending holiday, or, in the case of a child, where they go to play, what they look like and their name. Lethal.

If a profile can be built up impersonation is possible and privacy breached in other ways when people post information that is very personal and wouldn’t be shared face to face, a good example of the difference in behaviour offline and online.

Harking back to the use of language in a new context I recall a child of about 10 doing what, offline, any parent would be proud of, looking for a part-time job. She wanted to work with her great enthusiasm, horses, but advertised her services online giving her ‘phone number, post code and even a photograph. In days gone by such a post in the local newsagents minus the picture might have been a good idea but online it attracted far more views than there were stables in the area before the advert was removed. With post code and online maps particularly the child could have been easily traced.

Offline one has far more control of information. Imagine telling someone something inappropriate or showing them a picture, remembering this might be less likely face to face. In the event they try to tell someone else the owner of the information can always deny it in the face of lack of evidence. Posted online it is out of control and might be copied or shared even by people unknown to the owner. The scale of people to whom it is now available is also huge. Sexting, the process of sharing sexually explicit images of oneself, can go horribly wrong because of this. Trust, also on my list as something changed in the online age, can be betrayed sometimes not even out of malice but perhaps out of a misplaced admiration. The claim that the information is visible to friends only is no help when the definition of friend has changed and the friend might share to a wider audience.

“I deleted it” is often heard when someone realises that they have posted something that they now wish they hadn’t. What isn’t recognised is that content on the Internet is archived and often able to be found later. With employers now more than ever ready to search for information about an applicant online rather than in their CV this might be what Eric Schmidt, at the time chief executive at Google, had in mind when he said that we might be looking at the first generation that would have to change their names before looking for employment. There is an upside to this in that an online presence that demonstrates things like creativity and useful endeavour might be a real advantage.

To return briefly to scale something that seems obvious might not be clear yet to everyone. How many people might now have access to details you thought were private? How quickly can this information be spread? It is also more likely that physical distance is now longer the protection it was although I have been told by a parent in a remote rural area that his children were safe because they were miles from anywhere. This is hard to agree with if the assertion that a sexual predator might be increasingly likely to abuse online rather than risk meeting.

We need to know more about if and how people behave differently online too. The phenomenon of sexting suggests this is so and the possible deluge of aggressive comment to an opinion given online is another trend that is much less evident offline.

To turn to the question of trust I believe this has two facets, people and content. People relates in no small part to the use of the word ‘friends’. If we are interacting more with unfamiliar people we need to understand that the predator will not be unpleasant immediately but might employ a sophisticated range of strategies based on flattery, bribery and threat. Now more than ever young people need to be able to find a sympathetic adult if they find themselves slipping into trouble. The threat that they have done something wrong and will be in trouble must not be allowed to work. Adults need to understand that the perceived possibility of sanctions against the young person might stop them from asking for help. They also need to understand in the case of sexual predators there is only one person at fault and that is not the young person however unwise they might have been.

There might be a crossover point where trust in people meets trust in message, perhaps particularly with the purveyors of scams but I’ll turn to websites and the ability to recognise the truth. It is not exaggeration to say that for the majority, old or young, information literacy is non-existent.

“If the children are the future, the future might be very ill-informed.” – Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning November 22, 2016 (Stanford University – History). This study uses words like “dismaying” and “bleak” to describe the ability of people to evaluate information, or fake news as it has become known.

It’s no exaggeration to say that young people, and older ones for that matter, are unable to evaluate the accuracy and/or honesty of websites, identify the author or check whether the links are all to websites by the same person or organisation. It is also telling to be able to see what sites link to the one you’re looking at, a skill not at all widely practiced.

Even basic search skills such as creating key search terms, narrowing searches to specific sites or searching only sites from a particular country are unavailable to most. The latter raises the debate beyond questions of honesty and accuracy to the idea of multiple realities.

Moving on to identity online, linked to the issue of personal information discussed above, anonymity is a doubled edged sword. Often used by gamers in the form of a nickname this can protect privacy but also disguise a predator.

Another aspect of privacy is its place in the online world where increasingly everything is posted from the indecent selfie to holiday plans. In the offline world some things are still private and there is discussion to be had about the place online of things that are no secret but perhaps should be private. An example might be of a group of professional people on a night out. It’s no secret that lots of people enjoy this sort of experience but could the sharing of it damage reputations? My favourite analogous example is one that gets a delighted reaction from primary school children; it’s no secret that everyone goes to the toilet but it really ought to be private!

Related to scale but in terms of time is the concept of instant gratification. As an example, it’s always been the case that people have become angry perhaps at work of school and returned home in a bad mood. In the past slamming the door and a few other expressions of frustration would be followed by a cooling off, not necessarily happiness but a sense of perspective. In the world of social media all the old fashioned manifestations of anger are followed by an angry post. It’s only when the cooling off kicks in that the writer realises that control of the post is out of his/her hands and there’s no ‘take back’ button. Of course, this applies not just to anger but any sort of impetuosity.

A good place to finish perhaps is where online safety education should start. Recognition of what is appropriate behaviour online might reduce the population of trolls in future years. Firstly, it seems likely that we behave differently online. We might be braver, more outgoing, more aggressive… the list goes on. Do people recognise this only if challenged? As a society we put in a lot of work into coaching appropriate behaviour in the offline world and we need to develop similar strategies online. First though we need to know why we are emboldened. Has it to do with physical distance and a perceived safety of being in a comfortable environment? One thing is for sure, it’ll be complex and personal.

One last aspect of this is intellectual property. There can be hardly a person who hasn’t used content or images online probably with no regard for copyright. It might be argued that if you don’t want it copied don’t post it but really online content doesn’t differ from that in a book.

In summary we are interacting with a new technology in the same way people have always done; a way that will be viewed with astonishment by future, more experienced, generations. There is work to be done to understand the implications of this and then to persuade others that the issues exist. When we recognise that the vocabulary of offline does not equate with behaviour online we will have made progress.