Get a Second Life

A few weeks ago some hackers ‘stole’ Justice Michael Kirby’s identity to create a presence on the social networking site, MySpace. As The Age put it, ‘The identity thieves posed as the Australian judge to put sordid and sexually charged material on a fake Justice Kirby profile page.’

While there is no doubt that the use of Kirby’s personal details was offensive, so was the breathtaking ignorance of the article’s next sentence:

The case, which MySpace said could be the first confirmed instance of malicious identity fraud on the site, underlines the flimsy or fraudulent nature of much of the internet’s so-called ‘citizen journalism.’

Kirby’s identity thieves were not bloggers — although that is what the article means by its smug and ironic use of the phrase ‘citizen journalism.’

Mainstream media can be as dismissive as it likes, but so-called citizen journalism is becoming the journalism of choice of more and more people. It is fair to question the lack of editing and fact checking on the internet, and the partisan nature of many blogs — but then the mainstream media is looking increasingly shaky on those fronts as well, just read any Caroline Overington column.

As Antony Loewenstein wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald two weeks ago:

In Western nations, blogging has grown in popularity as public trust in the mainstream media has declined. Much of what passes for debate in the Australian press can be called ‘corkscrew journalism’ … According to Fred Halliday, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, the phrase is defined as ‘instant comment, bereft of research or originality, leading to a cycle of equally vacuous, staged polemics between columnists who have been saying the same thing for the past decade or more.’

In a fairly dramatic recognition of the internet’s key role in breaking news, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama recently chose to announce their respective candidacies for President of the United States on their websites.

It is true that part of the attraction of the internet is that people can invent personas that are hard to verify. Myspace is currently being sued by the families of four teenage girls who were sexually assaulted by men they met through the site. In these cases and the case of Justice Kirby, criminals have made use of the anonymity that the medium provides and it would be disingenuous to suggest that technology makes no difference at all. The internet does enable certain behaviors and it does give some people the level of anonymity they need to entrap.

In an attempt to manage this Myspace has hired a security officer, Hemanshu Nigam, and made it more difficult for users who are over 18 to contact users between the ages of 14 and 18. Nigam said that, ‘ultimately, internet safety is a shared responsibility … We encourage everyone to apply common sense offline security lessons in their online experiences and engage in open family dialogue about smart web practices.’