Online Communities: Predator Paradise - comment

This blog was one of my favourites to create and include for a number of reasons. The most important was the fact that i was interested in the issue of child predators in an online environment to begin with. The dynamics of creating another environment from which predators could access possible prey, in particular children and young people was an extremely interesting concept. One i wanted to further explore.

As i had a negative predisposition to this issue, one of the major battles i faced was ensuring my blog addressed all the important elements of the issue, without weighing too heavily on my feelings. Although i did carry a bias throughout the blog, most of the information supported my feelings, so i was able to reflect personally without affecting the overall success of the blog.

To achieve this balance i opened my blog with information on online communities in general, commenting on their benefits and uses throughout internet networks. From there i narrowed my field of focus to the issue of online predators and how online communities harbour this. I was also able to use this framework to address other online community elements that indirectly support predatory behaviour; commenting first on the relatively unmonitored nature of online environments and further on how the existing security acts as both a safeguard and restriction on parental guidance in these domains.

In retrospect, information on legislation and restrictions, or suggestions on possible ways to improve online domains would have added depth to my blog. But in the absence of these details, the flaws were overcome in a number of ways.

1. I addressed the issue of what was being done by making personal suggestions on how to improve the environments, such as underage children have parent peepholes to enable them access to certain areas of their children’s online share sites.
2. I commented on the required balance between parental access to their children’s sites, as well as respecting their privacy in an online environment.
3. I strengthened my argument against online communities by linking this article to the related article, ‘The Internet: A masquerade ball and everyone is invited, which raises the issue of anonymity in online communities and how this could increase predatory behaviours.

But the most effective element of this blog was the referencing i used. I started with the frameworks provided to me in the related podcast and lecture and from there moved to find external sources to support or reject those claims. As online predators are such as an opinion based subject i made sure the opinions i were quoting were from scholarly articles. This enabled me to make accurate judgements on the issue at hand and also to know that what i was saying was more likely to be true. In addition to scholarly articles i also referenced a wide range of journals and relevant statistics to ensure my statements were as accurate as they could be.