RePost: the interwebs - relevant analogies.

The following appeared on my original blog.

Intellectual intercourse requires maturity and an understanding of consequences. A recent NPR report presents several cautionary tales on cyber security / responsible online behavior. Scroll down to the “Excerpt: ‘The Future of Reputation,’” by Daniel J. Solove for a (haunting? sobering?) discussion of online ethics, gossip and shaming.

An adolescent girl engages in mildly (?) socially irresponsible behavior as a result became a pariah. She dropped out of college as a result. When you consider her transgression, the punishment really doesn’t fit the offense. Keep reading and the subtitle, “Chapter 1: When Poop Goes Primetime” may put you off as a potentially offensive, but if you read the section called, “The Internet as Teenager” all may become clear.

Personifying the technology and applying understanding of the stages human development, may bring a fresh perspective and an inroad for discussion. According to the article on NPR, the internet, “is now maturing into its second decade in mainstream culture — its teenage years….the teenage Internet is taking on all the qualities of an adolescent — brash, uninhibited, unruly, fearless, experimental, and often not mindful of the consequences of its behavior. And as with a teenager, the Net’s greater freedom can be both a blessing and a curse.”

There might be something to this. Scatological metaphors and analogies really work in explaining the web. Fortunately for myself, degrees in literature gave me a thick skin for such allusions (if you suffered through The Fairy Queene or Ubu Roi, you can handle anything). Unfortunately, even when successful in communicating a complicated idea, you can look foolish. Ted Stevens (R. Alaska), the octogenarian senator in charge of the committee regulating the internet, caught considerable flack for comparing the internet to plumbing but he has a point.

Many, including The Chronicle and others, rail against the overuse of Wikipedia as a solitary source of research. I developed an explanation for students that works. It’s brief and, in its own odd way, elegant, but I don’t always share it; particularly not until we’ve established trust and a mutual agreement on acceptable language in the classroom (and yeah, it’s a scatological metaphor).