Blogs: The Dark Side

The Misusage of Blogs

With the diversity of the World Wide Web, just as weblogs can be put to good use like citizen journalistic blogging, these weblogs can also be misused for bad intentions. For instance, some people turned their blogs into hate sites.

Hate sites as defined by the Media Awareness Network are websites that expresses and promotes hate and ill intentions. Common characteristics of these sites include capitalizing on paranoia, freely expressing crude criticism involving racism, sexism, religion and sexuality, exploitation of an individual, organisation or community and lastly, the spreading of smear campaigns.

The intertextuality of online networks actually contributes to the spreading of these hate sites. Multimodal modes like hyperlinks allow web-users to jump from webpage to webpage as well as creating a network of links with other websites (Schriver 1997). Therefore, with these hyperlinks, the spreading of hate messages promoted by a hate site is just a click away. This is why hate sites can indeed be a serious issue as hate messages can be easily scattered and distributed all over the internet within a short period of time.

A screenshot of an example of a hate site

Blogging with evil intentions

Unethical blogging methods like creating hate sites give raise to cyberbullying.

According the article, 'What can stop cyberbullying?' in BBC News, cyberbullying is defined as "the use of information and communications technology, particularly mobile phones and the internet deliberately, to upset someone else." As according to another BBC News article, this problem is growing across the world with the raise of cyber literacy as more young people, having able to obtain access to the internet, computers and even having mobile phones, are using them for ill intentions.

Today, in this modern age of technology, all texts are multimodal text, comprising of a combination of words, images and other visual modes (Walsh 2006, p. 26). Thus, a hate message can be spread through ways and means of blackmails, computer viruses, hate mails, grostesque pictures or videos and even death threats.

An example of a death threat note found in Google

(Picture sourced from: http://boles.com/called/07/jackie1.jpg)

A picture example of what cyberbullying is like

(Picture sourced from: www.uberreview.com)

Would you like it if you are ambushed with disturbing mails and threats to the point where even home does not feel safe anymore? Like the old saying goes, 'do not do unto others what you dont want others to do upon you'.

Robyn, a victim of cyberbullying. She received numerous death threats from her cousin through her mobile phone and computer and had to change her mobile phone number a lot of times to get rid of the threats.

(Picture sourced from: BBC News)

Blogging with ethics

All bloggers belonged to an online social networking system also known as the Blogosphere (Tremayne 2007, p. 2). As users of the internet and community members of the blogosphere, there are certain ethics and rules that we need to abide by (Patterson & Wilkins 2005, p. 256-257). We need to respect the feelings and personal space of other web-users (Patterson & Wilkins 2005, p. 256-257).

Thus, as a blogger, we need to be cautious in the information we put up into our blogs as as to avoide offending anyone's feelings. As Schriver (1997) puts it, decoding of a message is influenced by a person's general knowledge, personal experiences, culture, social awareness and feelings. Different people have different interpretations of the same issue or topic, hence, as ethical bloggers, we need to make sure that the content of our weblogs are neutral. Also, as web-users with ethics, internet sites and weblogs should not be abused in a way where it causes harm and discomfort to other people.

Let's all be friends!

(Picture sourced from Flickr)

Reference list:

1. Cyberbullying 2007, BBC News, viewed on 14 June 2008 at http://www.bbc.co.uk/northyorkshire/content/articles/2007/02/20/txtbullying_feature.shtml

2. Deconstructing Hate Sites 2008, Media Awareness Network, viewed on 13 June 2008 at http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/online_hate/deconst_online_hate.cfm

3. Patterson, P & Wilkins, L 2005, 'Media Ethics: Issues and Cases', Fifth Edition, McGraw-Hill, High Education, New York

4. Schriver, KA 1997, 'Dynamics in Document Design: Creating Text for Readers', Wiley Computer Publisher, New York

5. Tremayne, M 2007, 'Blogging, Citizenship and the Future Media', Routledge, New York

6. Walsh, M 2006, 'Textual Shifts: Examining The Reading Process With Print, Visual and Multimodal Text', Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol. 29, no. 1, p. 24-37

7. What Can Stop Cyberbullying? 2007, BBC News, viewed on 14 June 2008 at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7006326.stm