Web As a Forum for Harassment in Schools
Recently the Washington Post published a front-page article about AutoAdmit, a web site for “college discussion.” The article alleged that many college women were being denied jobs and were afraid to be seen around campus because of things that were posted about them on AutoAdmit.
This sounded like an extreme case of harassment, so I checked the web site to find out what was being posted about women. The site was full of one-liner potty humor by computer geeks, inappropriate for a chat about college admissions, but nothing to feel threatened about. If any employer based their decisions on what is posted on the site, I’d probably not trust their judgment on anything else.
Although the Post article seems to be much ado about nothing, it does bring up the issue that the web can be used as an anonymous forum for harassment. And schools or employers can do little to prevent harassing posts on web sites since many web sites are independent from school or employment affiliations. On sites such as MySpace, teens and twenty-somethings often post detailed information about themselves to share with friends. I even tried a few sites myself. 1 2 3 The technology age brings new challenges for avoiding harassment.
A version of this article appeared in the April newsletter for the Vienna, VA, branch of the American Association of University Women
This sounded like an extreme case of harassment, so I checked the web site to find out what was being posted about women. The site was full of one-liner potty humor by computer geeks, inappropriate for a chat about college admissions, but nothing to feel threatened about. If any employer based their decisions on what is posted on the site, I’d probably not trust their judgment on anything else.
Although the Post article seems to be much ado about nothing, it does bring up the issue that the web can be used as an anonymous forum for harassment. And schools or employers can do little to prevent harassing posts on web sites since many web sites are independent from school or employment affiliations. On sites such as MySpace, teens and twenty-somethings often post detailed information about themselves to share with friends. I even tried a few sites myself. 1 2 3 The technology age brings new challenges for avoiding harassment.
A version of this article appeared in the April newsletter for the Vienna, VA, branch of the American Association of University Women
posted by Lisa Schaefer at 2:43 PM
1 Comments:
Lisa:
The issue of privacy has kept me from publishing a blog to date - except in comments :-)
And - it's deeper than that - I think we've probably yet to come to terms with how data mining can affect the individual. I appreciate Google's employee guideline: "Don't be evil," particularly in this context. Not everyone is like Google. And Google may not be Google forever.
But social, volunteer, "like-interest" networking has too many benefits for us to abandon it. I just ran across the link below:
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2185235/internet-gives-birth-generation
...although I take "generation naming" with a grain of salt...
steve
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