If a drunk driver slams his car into a tree and is killed, would the authorities criticise the car manufacturer for not making the vehicle safer for drunk drivers?
No, of course they wouldn't. It's not the fault of the car; it's the fault of the driver. And yet it seems this type of hunting for easy solutions is all too common in today's society.
Now, I mention this because I was just reading a report about Facebook, slamming it for not keeping people, particularly young people, safe from dangerous strangers online.
When something terrible happens to a person, they, and their friends and relatives, are bound to harbour resentment towards the cause of the terrible happening. This is perfectly understandable - there always needs to be people who are on the side of the victim, it's only right - but sometimes it should stop with the close associates. Sometimes, whatever caused the terrible incident only did so through a lack of judgement on the victim's part. In these cases, less pressure should be put onto the cause. Especially if the pressure can negatively impact other people, people who are smart enough to cope anyway.
Facebook is merely a tool, a means by which people can communicate with other people at the click of a button. It is not an online community; the online community exists
through Facebook. The site didn't come into being with already existing communities, because it needs people to do that. People make communities.
So it seems a little unfair to me that people read about other people being lured to their deaths through meeting people on Facebook, and go all Mary Whitehouse on the poor site (look her up if you didn't get that last bit).
Those who fall foul of Facebook only do so through a lack of necessary caution. One should exhibit apprehension when accepting friend requests from strangers. Make sure they are who they say they are, and that you don't put yourself in potential danger through associating with them.
Of course, the younger people may not have this developed awareness, but to blame Facebook for that is also ludicrous. If a child wanders onto a dual carriageway and is hit by a car, it is not the fault of the road for being too busy; either the child was not sufficiently tutored in the ways of road safety, or there was a lack of necessary signs or constraints in that area. Facebook is, in my humble opinion, excellent at warning you about potential threats to your online safety whenever possible. So these youngsters, innocently oblivious to the dangers of online strangers, are only being put in danger by those responsible for them. Those responsible should warn their children, imbue them with a deep-rooted sense of online awareness, and keep an eye on them when Facebooking.
Unfortunately, the world doesn't work like that. The rational people, those who understand the workings of Facebook, see the human errors of others and accept them as human errors, are often the ones who keep to themselves. To be rational is to step back and put everything into perspective, but you can't step back if you're smack in the middle of it all. The parents and close friends of the victims are bound to have this blinkered, blood-tinted opinion of Facebook, because it's either that or accept that poor little Timmy was being an idiot. These people, people with significantly more emotional damage than peripheral vision, are the ones who appear on the news and in the papers, ranting and raving about how
'the evil of social networking destroyed/took the life of my poor little under-experienced, unsupervised child!'
The media is far from rational itself. It all boils down to money. The news companies get money from ratings and purchases, and the ratings and purchases positively correlate with the amount of bad news there is. After all, good news happens all the time. Has your area been hit by an earthquake? No? Then bugger off with your good news, because neither have most places. Bad news is, from a global perspective, more interesting than no news at all, and good news is rarely any more interesting than anything you could discover by going for a walk.
The news loves sob stories. One of the only things it loves more than sob stories is the resultant support the sobbers receive. This invariably provides the news with even more money; they get to prolong the news story and they receive thousands of calls from easily-swayed people with a lot of time on their hands and higher blood pressure than IQ.
Meanwhile, the rational majority sit back with a justifiable apathy. But nobody with any power wants to hear from them. No matter how solid and sane their views are, they're just not very interesting.
Our growing ability to adapt to our consequently shrinking boredom threshold will inevitably be our downfall as a species.
Will
Taking this, and the similar signs in the background, into account, one can only assume that the software opts not to blur your face if you're a posterised southern colonel who is facing north.
