"An unregulated internet is a time bomb that will blow up in our faces sooner rather than later. Unless we ensure all media are governed by a strong moral framework, we will continue to see an increase of the many apparently motiveless crimes dogging our society."
So says John Beyer, chairman of mediawatch-uk, in a Scotland Sunday-Herald exploration of what is bad about the Internet and what can be done about it. Certainly, he feels that uniform regulation that extends from the broadcast TV model to the Internet if the answer. Others disagree.
In tracing the societal impact of the Internet, one side of the Sunday-Herald, story says, in the words of a quoted psychology professor...
"Technology is encouraging us to explore a dark side of ourselves that we've always kept repressed. It allows us to do things we'd never do face-to-face, and we're beginning to see the quite horrible results of that. It's as if we suspend our moral framework when we go online."
Is this so? Or does the Internet merely reflect and broadcast human darkness that has existed for untold centuries?
Or, maybe, as the psychology professor suggests, the Internet creates a distortion field for bad behavior:
Separation - the real digital divide - may be the root cause at the heart of this thorny issue. According to Cooper at Lancaster University, his research has revealed a massive upsurge in email bullying and intimidation that he believes is directly proportional to our increasing preference for electronic communications over human interaction....
"We need to reboot our moral code and start to think more about what we're doing online and and truly understand that just because something is happening via a screen doesn't mean it's not real," says Cooper.
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