Friday, March 9, 2007

QotW6: Who is who?

I. To surive is to surveil:
Managing a online community is a time-consuming and hard work. However, the joy of seeing the growth of your community can ease any pains. It sometimes becomes a good source of income for the owner as well. The happiness always pays a price: the threat of being hacked. Therefore, forum security is the most headache problem for every webmaster. One of the best ways to fight against hackers is surveillance: keep an eye on forum members.The reason is that most of the attacks come from a undercover member. Trust - in a person or in a system, such as a banking system - can be a means of coping with risk, while acceptance of risk can be a means of generating trust', Giddens writes
II. The required exposure:
As we can see from the above profile, an administrator can know a member pretty well. He can search on GeoIP member's IP in order to know where the member is living. For example, this is a free GeoIP service we can use from http://www.hostip.info/

We also able to find out members' characteristic as they exposed their MSN, Myspace, Skype, Yahoo ID.... Another way is googling email address. Even though a person hide all of his profile, he must provide a valid email address in order to register to an online forum. He might not fill his MSN ID on one forum, but he may disclose it somewhere else. And the Mighty Google will be able to trace his email address together with other information.
Hence, administrators require members to provide the above information. It will help administrators easily monitor their members' activities. If someone pose a threat to the forum, administrators will be able to ban IP or locating the attackers if necessary.
In this case, users have no choices but revealing their information to webmasters. Obviously, the information is claimed to be kept confidentially until someone hack into the database.
III. The Naked Crowd
Understanding the risk of being exposed, Internet users still reveal their identities. There must be some motivations:
- Personal branding: The idea of selling people as products began to appear in magazines like Ad Age as early as the 1970s; but the idea of personal branding didn't proliferate until the 1990s, when a series of business books emerged with names like Brand You, The Personal Branding Phenomenon, and Be Your Own Brand: A Breakthrough Formula for Standing Out from the Crowd. To invent a successful brand you have to establish trust with strangers, argues the personal branding guru, Tom Peters ( Rosen, 2004). People love to be famous. And of course, being recognized is an indispensable part of fame. The rise of social networking site urges people to show their pictures, videos, stories in order to be welcomed on every other sites.
- Social proof: As "we view a behavior as correct in a given situation to the degree that we see other performing it” (Cialdini, 2001), we will find our ways to join the stream of Blogging. Many people come to Blogs through friends, peer pressure rather than finding a place to record their daily lives. The spread of Blog is also contributed by words of mouth rather than advertising.
VI. Conclusion:
Surveillance is a sensitive word in many societies. It makes people feel lack of freedom. However, Web 2.0 is making people feel comfortable of being surveiled. RSS feed is a hidden form of surveillance. Through RSS feed, we can anonymously monitor someone behaviors EVERYDAY! Therefore, we should be careful of what we blog.


Reference:
Cialdini, R. (2001). Influence: Science and Practice. Allyn and Bacon: Singapore

Rosen, J. (2004, July 19). The Naked Crowd. Retrieved March 9, 2007, from http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/0000000CA5FF.htm

Giddens, A. (1998). Conversations with Anthony Giddens: Making Sense of Modernity. Stanford University Press

1 comment:

Kevin said...

"Web 2.0 is making people feel comfortable of being surveiled. RSS feed is a hidden form of surveillance."

Interesting thoughts... actually Feedburner does let you track your RSS readership and can reveal quite a bit of detail.

Full grade and a creative award coming your way.