Reading Response #3 (Media 280)

Protocol Politics by Laura Denardis

What I believe is that anything is perfect and definitely comes with some issues, and Internet protocol issues are good examples of this. The Internet is now one of the necessities in our lives, and many jobs require the Internet use. My job is one of them. I work in a television production company as an intern. My position is TV coordinator/researcher; therefore, the Internet is required to do research. Even for school works, I use the Internet; however, as the reading, Protocol Politics by Laura Denardis and the class discussion regarding her article, the Internet is causing the privacy issues, and one of the examples is Facebook. I totally agree with Facebook is no longer safe anymore. It is huge today and everyone all over the world can sign up as long as they have e-mail address. I do not trust Facebook at all; therefore I block the access to see my tagged pictures and I never accept any friend request except people I know.

The Facebook issue is now even featured in movie, for example, Catfish. I saw this movie a couple weeks ago, and I liked it, especially the fact that the movie is documentary. The story is that a young man who lives in New York, Nev, receives a painting from a girl, Abby, who is still in elementary school and they become friends on Facebook. Then he also becomes friends with Abby’s mother, Angela, and her sister, Megan. Nev and Megan start having interests each other, and Nev decides to go to see her; however, what Nev finds out there is that Megan actually does not exist: Angela was Megan and kept touch with him. In addition, Abby is not a painter: she was a normal young girl. Angela is the one who paints and mailed one of her paintings to Nev by saying Abby drew it.

The movie basically shows that people can lie easily online. It kind of freaks me out that the people like Angela exist. I do not blame Angela, because she was psychologically unhealthy and is unhappy with her personality and life, so that meeting new people on Facebook is one of her enjoyments in her life. The scaring thing is that some people are using Facebook in the wrong way like the movie. Since Angela has many Facebook accounts under different names, including Megan, she copies pictures of somebody who she does not even know on Facebook and using it as Megan, and the other people. Facebook now has a huge number of users, so that the people whose pictures were used by her did not realize it at all. I thought that this movie shows me how danger my privacy is on Facebook.

As we talked in the class, the Internet developers are putting so much effort to solve the privacy issue and working on switching IPv4 to IPv6, but it is not easy at all because the Internet is now globalized and too huge. Denardis addresses the different solution, “users understand the possible threats to individual privacy searching the Internet” (75). The technological solution, which is switching to IPv6 from IPv4, seems like difficult and takes more time, but being aware of the possible identity threats on the Internet is the easiest way and the Internet users can do immediately. This is the first thing we should do against this issue.

Catfish Trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFKe75Q6eVw