Steve Clare / The Silhouette

When viewing any controversial Opinion piece on the Silhouette website (or any online news source), make sure to scroll down to the comments section for your daily dose of disheartening viciousness. Ideally the comments are a place to continue the conversation and expose different viewpoints. Too often though, they prove just another platform for ad hominem hatred.

The problem is the anonymous nature of the internet. Commenting on a Sil article requires one to enter a name and email address, but the name can be fake, and there’s no verification process for the email. So, there’s really no need to attach any part of your identity to your post. There are no personal repercussions for launching hurtful personal attacks.

This lack of consequence is why online comments so often devolve into vengeful pot-shots directed by anonymous assailants. If all comments had to have a real name and verified email attached to them, would we see so much casual sexism, racism, bigotry and homophobia?

Of course, the purpose of a comment can (and perhaps should) be to challenge the author of an article and act as a fact-checking or opposing viewpoint. But so often on the internet we see these accusations made in a manner that is hurtful and offensive, which only serves to build up the walls between opposing sides and actually hamper the flow of discourse between them. When did you last win an argument by resorting to shouting and name-calling?

It’s only possible to change someone’s mind by shaping your argument to their predispositions. Appeal creates impact, and it’s impossible to do that when your point is saddled with harsh accusations of inadequacy.

People work hard on their opinion pieces. You don’t spend hours crafting a history of Israel, a defense of Israeli Apartheid Week, a critique of the Catholic Church, or an examination of the media’s coverage of the Steubenville case, as many Silhouette contributors have in recent weeks, unless it’s an issue you care deeply and think often about.

In each of these cases the authors have been subject to all manner of damning accusations in the comments section beneath their piece.

Perhaps justified criticism, perhaps not. But in every case, many comments that went against the sentiment of the article were delivered in a heavy-handed manner, and often the criticizer chose to hide behind an anonymous online username.

I’d like to think that there is more keeping us from hurting each other than just fear of retribution.

I truly would like to think that we recognize, on some deeper level, that we’re all just trying to make our way through a thoroughly confusing existence as best we can, and that there’s really no need to make that journey any more difficult for someone than it needs to be.

But then I see what happens when people adopt anonymity and discover that any personal consequences resulting from their actions evaporate.

What happens is that the filters collapse, and empathy goes with them. That lends strong support for the depressing Epicurean view of morality; that the only thing keeping the streets from dissolving into anarchical hellholes of rape, murder and theft is the omnipresent fear of being caught and punished, in this life or the next.

There’s simply no need to poison one’s comments with hurtful barbs and, indeed, doing so is only counterproductive if your goal is to sway someone to your side of an argument. It’s really easy to be mean when only your computer screen is there to see it. But the next time you’re typing out a sarcastic, rude, insulting or petty response to an article you disagree with, just remember that there’s a person on the receiving end, and that they’re as likely to swap sides on this debate as you are (which is to say, not very likely at all).

If you instead shape your response to appeal to their sensibilities, you’ll create impact. That’s what changes the world - people realizing that their opponent is thinking and growing as much as they are.

Besides, if you’re not trying to change something, then why the hell are you typing anyway? Recognize that the transformation you desire will only materialize when you accept that the person you’re talking to is as infinitely layered and complex and confused and scared as you are.

Justin Raudys / The Silhouette

Being part of what one of my professors calls “a special generation” – that is, the first generation to grow up online – it’s becoming hard for me to recall those bygone days when an unanswered problem or question wasn’t instantly turned into a Google search. The pre-Internet world is a hazy, distant past to the many millions of people around the world who were, like me, born in the 1990s.

I can ring off countless things about the Internet that are not only lovable but utterly extraordinary: one can hear the words and voices of the greatest teachers and musicians and philosophers that ever lived at the click of a search button; one can instantaneously see and hear loved ones thousands of kilometers away, free of cost; the poorest person in the world could, with that magical connection, tap into all imaginable fields of education in existence.

The Internet is here to stay, and it’s allowing previously unthinkable things to be achieved. But as much as I love the Internet, I equally loathe my incapacity to tear myself from its grasp. I suppose you could say it’s a virtual love/hate relationship. This dichotomy of hate obviously doesn’t come from the abovementioned examples of the positive and constructive capacities of online connections. It comes from something that the Internet does to us when, as it’s so easy to do, we overuse it.

The Internet is ever-increasing in its ability to immerse us and is rapidly becoming more and more integrated into the daily affairs of all people, especially those in my age group.

But I don’t often see the questions asked, what should we make of this increasing immersion in the digital world? In what ways is this increasing reliance on the Internet changing us? Are these changes for the worse or for the better?

I fear – and many of my colleagues share this sentiment – that the quick-fire mode of online data consumption and the condensation of information into ever-smaller and ever-easier-to-consume fragments have undermined my attention span.

Indeed, as an English major I feel blasphemous in conceding that I often find it hard to simply sit down and read long passages of text – even a news article can seem, after prolonged Internet use, tediously long.

Why? It seems to me as though it’s largely because I have trained my mind day after day, month after month, year after year to become accustomed to the fast-flashing, bite-sized, viral-video-serving conveyor belt of quick, cheap entertainment and information that often comes with the likes of Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit and so on.

Now, to argue that my “hate” – my addiction to the Internet and its effect on my mind – doesn’t stem from my own vices would be idiotic. It smacks of the lawsuits obese Americans have made against McDonalds, charging the golden arches for being responsible for their personal plight.

But I encounter this problem among many of my friends with increasing frequency and am convinced that the Internet is undermining many people’s ability to stay focussed on one thing and, by extension, to truly savour moments that are worth cherishing and to take the time to ponder things that are worth pondering. After all, how often do we see a large group of young friends completely invested in spending time with each other in the moment without at least someone veering off into the world of distraction on their phone? How often do we see people constantly reading vacuous things on the Internet instead of reading books?

Sitting at the back of one of my large English classes, I surveyed what is now surely a common sight in universities: of the upwards of fifty laptops in the class, more than half of them had Facebook open. I may sound old fashioned, but something about that image just doesn’t sit right with me. Are we so neurotically obsessed with staying up to date and up to the minute with all our Facebook friends that we can’t even sit through 50 minutes that are supposed to be reserved for actually focusing and learning things? I must admit that I have often, like many people I know, made checking Facebook one of the first things – if not the first thing – I do in the day.

I know the phrase “take it slow” reads as utterly cliché, but that doesn’t mean it’s not of value, and I think that it’s precisely what a lot of Internet over-users like me could benefit from doing. I know I profit every time I take a moment to circumspect, to breathe in, to think a little more deeply, to reflect on who I am and to take time to think about what I’m doing – and I know that jumping on the Internet every ten minutes isn’t exactly helping me do that.

The levels of Internet use are only increasing, and what I see as the problem of Internet addiction is only going to get worse.

Cornel West says that the Internet’s “clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists.” I’d have to say I agree. The irony? I saw it on his Facebook page.

Kacper Niburski / Silhouette Staff

If you are reading this article, then you already know. You’ve always known. You were raised knowing. When you asked a question, it was found in slow evaporation of ignorance. When you uncovered a mystery of the Universe, it was behind the whispered curiosity if something as whimsical as a truth could ever possibly exist. Even now as you surf through the vestigial media of the past – a newspaper – you understand.

Hell. That’s why you’re here. That’s why you stay here. Because from a very young age when you asked why the sky was blue or how rainbows formed or if Santa really fit in the chimney, you learned that knowledge is power. Information is power. And you’ll be damned if anyone told you otherwise.

But even you, dear reader, have had some doubts. You’ve seen first hand that sometimes it only matters who you know, not what you know, and you comfort yourself with the fact that that this is something you know very well. Besides that, the inane facts you’ve learned over the years feel static without some active creativity behind them. Without constant stimulation, they flare and wane, eventually sitting idle in a cerebral black hole alongside your grandma’s birthday and basic algebra.

You’ll be the first to admit that some days, knowledge seems a fad no more permanent than a slinky. This is not entirely your fault, however. It stems from the fact that the power knowledge brings with it isn’t yours to begin with anyways. In fact, it never was. It was, and remains to be, with those who hold the information. For they, and only they, can express the undifferentiated mass of everything we’ve learned and everything we haven’t in a way that’s accessible for everyone.

While this seems falsely utopian in nature, listen: underscoring the tacit feeling that we’re all in this – whatever this thing is – together is the drive that we’re learning about “this” so others don’t have to. For no matter how selfish our desires may be, we are not that which comes and goes. We are footprints, handprints, writings and vocal traditions. We are stencils on caves and the unmistakable smells of calcium carbonate on a chalkboard. We are stories told around campfires. We are laughter and tears and happiness and sadness. We are the Bible and the Quran. We are the Rig Veda. We are Macbeth. We are Catch-22. We are a history that stretches from the Serengeti to the Tundra that has gazed upon the stars at night and has soared with the likes of them too.

And it is in these stars floating around a world we did not create, a body we did not ask to be born into, and a Universe that seems just as much as a hilarious accident as we are, where humanity’s legacy stems. There among the celestial bodies waltzing in the seamless black blanket of the sky, our knowledge expands only to find its limit. It is contained in our Universe defined by some edge, and we, so far as we know, are the only ones who are conscientious of that fact.

Yet even with this knowledge, even with this power, we have become victims of our brilliance. Aaron Swartz, an unparalleled programmer and Internet activist who took his life on Jan. 11, knew this well.

Cursed with an open mind coupled with an unrelenting passion for the betterment of humanity, he understood that only by possessing such inborn intelligence and such a wealth of knowledge could we have devised systems that hurts more than heals, that widens the wealth gap between otherwise equal humans, that works to punish the poor and those who challenge the powerful, and that locks the very cultural information we have been born into behind an array of corporate interests and private wealth. In short, he knew the pain of being human.

In an attempt to rectify this pain, he tried to change the world. Besides creating Reddit and Really Simple Syndicate, both of which have become foundations of the Internet, his work was dedicated to make the world a better place for us all.

While his most recent selfless act has been marred in complexities, it shouldn’t be the case. Any way it’s told, he remains the Robin Hood of information by attempting to bring the academic world out of the puppetry of private greed. By accessing four million documents on JSTOR, a nonprofit academic online library within MIT, he was charged on twelve accounts of felony and could have faced up to thirty-five years in jail.

Murder, slavery, and pedophilia have shorter terms.

Yet the senseless severity of the punishment brings to light the very needed discussion on cyber legislation, something being seen widely as a threat in the political world. No matter what comes from this, however, I will remain to be incredulous. Trying to bridge the Old World with the New results in the massacre on the scales of Columbus. One side loses, the other wins. Always. My only hope is that it’s the New World ushered by the Internet that will win out again.

Aaron hoped as much. In 2008, he wrote, “With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge – we’ll make it a thing of the past.” I’ll add a secondary wish that privatization on information will become vestigial knowledge reserved only to frighten children on the failings of humankind.

Social media circles were shaken on Monday as private messages on Facebook sent between 2007 and 2009 were mysteriously appearing on users’ public timelines.

The website, is denying all instances of the leak, explaining that many users are mistaken and are confusing older public messages for private messages.

Numerous students are reporting otherwise.

Philip Savage, Assistant Professor of Communications Studies at McMaster University and researcher of communication law and policy, says that Canada has safeguards in place to combat digital privacy breaches.

“[There] is legislation in Canada to protect your rights as an individual in matters of privacy. PIPEDA sets out rules around the obligations of any government of commercial enterprise around collecting and sharing information on people,” said Savage.

PIPEDA, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, explicitly outlines the rules surrounding the collection and distribution of personal, private information.

Section 4.7.1 states that an organization’s “security safeguards shall protect personal information against loss or theft, as well as unauthorized access, disclosure, copying, use or modification. Organizations shall protect personal information regardless of the format in which it is held.”

“You cannot have your private correspondence shared, regardless of the Terms of Service that you may have signed,” said Savage in reference to clause 16.3 in the Facebook terms of service.

The terms state, in part, “We do not guarantee that Facebook will always be safe, secure or error-free or that Facebook will always function without disruptions, delays or imperfections.”

An organization’s terms of service, accepted or otherwise, cannot supersede Canadian regulations as long as they operate within the country.

The personal information act does not differentiate between breaches of information as both technical fouls and ethical missteps, and clearly outlines that “an organization may collect, use or disclose personal information only for purposes that a reasonable person would consider are appropriate in the circumstances,” which would be employed, for example, in the case of releasing to police officers relevant information in a criminal investigation or about people who are at risk for suicide and abuse.

This is not the first breach of privacy in Facebook’s recent history, as the social media icon was involved in a lengthy investigation in May 2008 regarding “22 separate violations of PIPEDA,” surrounding the collection and disclosure of information on the site. The accusation was brought forward by the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, CIPPIC, an organization spawned of the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law.

Leslie Regan Shade, Associate Professor of the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, provided her insights into a history rife with legal issues. “Facebook has always played a cat and mouse game with privacy laws and data commissioners. CIPPIC found that many of the issues that were brought to Facebook’s attention were resolved, and it set a global precedent for Facebook,” said Shade. While the issues were resolved within the one-year time limit set by the Assistant Privacy Commissioner, CIPPIC continued to have concerns with the default settings for users not being reflective of the intent behind the initial resolution.

“If you do not file a complaint, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner may not begin an official investigation in the near future,” said Shade.

Even more recently, Facebook underwent intense scrutiny by the Federal Trade Commission in the U.S. on their propensity to reveal private information that users were told would be kept private. The resulting case was settled on the premise that Facebook would undergo regular auditing every two years for the next twenty years as a countermeasure to their quickly shifting privacy atmosphere.

“I think whenever you have huge amounts of information gathered, that there will be mishaps,” said Savage. It is an organizations’ responsibility to have both technical protection in place and accountable individuals available when such a privacy breach is discovered, as outlined by PIPEDA.

Savage believes that this is an issue that needs to be investigated by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, headed by Jennifer Stoddard, the Commissioner herself.

“The Office has been proactive in investigating breaches of privacy in the past, such as the photo tagging issue on Facebook where users were being tagged without their prior consent,” he said.

He then added that the Office was also instrumental in changing Google’s policy in their maps application to include the distortion of faces and sensitive addresses such as women’s shelters.

A statement released by the privacy commissioner’s office on Tuesday elaborated the minister’s current investigation into privacy leaks by popular websites. Research conducted by the office found that “approximately one in four of the sites tested,” had “significant privacy concerns.”

Stoddard has contacted eleven unnamed organizations to inquire into their privacy practices and work with them to ascertain their compliance with PIPEDA and related laws.

“It is time for a more considered, government-driven inquiry into protecting privacy. The means by which PIPEDA and other privacy safeguards are enforced are not resourced enough,” said Savage.

In the meantime, Savage urges students to read the nature of their agreements with organizations, and complain to their service providers if they feel their privacy has been violated.

Andrew Terefenko

Opinions Editor

 

As another year meets us, another glorious threat to the livelihood of the World Wide Web rears its ugly head. Unlike those that came before it, however, this new threat is not in danger of simply dissolving to the cries of public opinion.

This time there is a real danger of digital catastrophe, with the only question being how we will rebuild the net in the wake of hurricane SOPA.

The Stop Online Piracy Act may seem harmless at a brief glance, intended only to deter those who would otherwise steal copyrighted content for their own personal consumption. It also works on the second front of protecting the interests of intellectual property owners, but even some of those are lashing out against the bill.

The real meat of the bill allows the U.S. law enforcement officials greater power in their legislative battles against online piracy. It gives them the ability to force search engines, ISPs and even other websites to block out any sites that the government feels is ‘enabling or facilitating online piracy and theft.’

That is the point that the bill becomes highly poisonous to our modern way of life. Entire digital acres of the Internet are devoted to sharing, mashing, mixing, and trashing copyrighted material for mass consumption, in the name of satire, humour and good old-fashioned trolling. Should a SOPA-like bill pass, we would cease to see most content that sites like Youtube are comprised of in their entirety. We would be left with our pick of official movie trailers, video blogs and Black-Eyed Peas “music” videos.

While I agree that piracy in the form of movie and television streaming has gotten a bit out of hand, given that I can watch entire seasons of my favourite shows for free within the top three Google searches, this measure is far too all-encompassing to fight such a minor battle. A revised bill should be put forth to combat websites that explicitly host or enable blatant piracy, but the SOPA bill in its current form is too volatile to co-exist with free speech.

There are arguments to support even the anti-business sentiments that some feel are going to emerge from a purportedly pro-business bill. Web experts on the whole seem to believe that digital media organizations, and even some non-media-centric jobs on the net would be at risk to lose all outside funding, as most investors would back out in fear of encountering later legal troubles.

The main argument that resonates with me the most is the idea that combating piracy directly is never a sensible decision, as the costs are often too high for the return. The amount of resources it would require to investigate and prosecute an offender through sites like Google and individual ISPs would far outweigh the cost and time spent by any one individual, who can whip together an identical site in his or her free time. You can see the same effect in PC gaming, where more often than not, paying customers are the ones that are frustrated with restrictive anti-piracy measures, such as activation limits and online-only access. In the meantime pirates and the hacking/modding community as a whole usually removes the anti-piracy measures from their copies of the game for uninterrupted, illegal fun.

Resources are better allocated towards giving paying customers a better experience, making them feel like they are getting their money’s worth. I’m sorry to say this, record companies, but the average consumer does not feel that twenty dollars is a fair price for a mass-produced album that only really has three songs they like, when they can spend 3 bucks on the songs they want online, and for the more frugal, listen for free before they decide on YouTube or Grooveshark. If consumers are being met halfway with value expectations, then piracy on the whole is less of an issue outside of the truly desperate or lazy among us.

There is a good chance this bill will pass when the American Congress returns from its winter recess, and a greater chance that, if passed, the American government will urge their northern neighbours to adopt a similar bill. There is the best chance, however, that enough people will stand in the way of such an atrocity so that it never sees the light of legal day.

Roy Campbell

The Silhouette

 

The McMaster Student Union (MSU) is introducing a new classified advertisement service designed specifically for students. MACSList is now available on the MSU website for students to advertise goods and services in and around the McMaster community.

The service, launched this August, is part of the MSU’s effort to connect with students through a wider range of new media platforms.

The advertisement service is currently in a trial stage and is open for anyone to access, but “when it is fully operational, it will be [accessible only to McMaster students],” according to MSU general manager John McGowan.

This, he says, will allow students to find and post advertisements specifically for them, instead of searching through larger, general-interest classified advertising websites such as Craigslist. The student-focused classifieds forum is similar to the classified service available on the student-run website MacInsiders, but the two sites are not affiliated or co-ordinated, noted McGowan.

Originally planned last year under former MSU president Mary Koziol’s student government, MACSList was designed as a result of changing trends in the way that McMaster students buy and sell goods.

“We [have tried to provide] a physical market to trade courseware through the bookstore,” said McGowan, “but some of the feedback we got from students was that it’s kind of passé. Many more students buy and sell either online or through peer-to-peer selling, so we’ve tried to create another tool to provide to students for selling books and other items.”

The MSU plans to make MACSList part of a network of new services meant to connect students with each other and the University though online and digital media. “We would like to have as many tools as possible on our website in order to bring in McMaster students [to connect with each other] on all aspects of the student experience outside the classroom,” said McGowan.

One of these tools is “My Ideas,” an online forum on the MSU website where students can provide feedback, suggestions or concerns about the student union’s services.

It is evident that MACSList is in its developmental stage. It currently has only a handful of advertisements despite its prominent display on the MSU website.

This is set to change in January 2012, however, when widespread promotions for the service will begin. The MSU will also begin promoting other University services through a range of new media, including advertising on LCD screens around campus.

“We are trying to reach [students] through as many means as possible,” said McGowan.

Most of these new services and technologies offered by the MSU are only emerging now, and it remains to be seen how exactly they will impact student life.

It is up to McMaster students to decide if and how MACSList and the MSU’s other services will be used.