Our World Is Changing

Crime is an inescapable aspect of our world. So, when we move our world online, crime will follow. In 2019, the police arrested Hibiki Sato on allegations of stalking and sexually assaulting a young j-pop star. The BBC reported that ‘[Hibiki] had identified a train station reflected in the singer's eyes in a selfie she posted online.’ From there, he ‘waited at the station until he saw his victim and followed her to her home.’ Social media is something that must be approached with caution. Their affordances and conveniences can act as bait, putting us at risk. Unfortunately, a large amount of people are unaware of the potential danger.

[The J-pop star on the left, Hibiki Sato on the right. Image found here.]

One terrifying example is our Address. SNS sites such as Facebook have an option to fill in our address and there are many who provide their real home address. Young teenagers especially are prone to not be entirely cognisant of the risks of this action. If the account is set to public, or if the data is leaked in a security breach of the sites servers, or if a friend of that profile is feeling vindictive, they could perform an action known as ‘Swatting’.

In one instance in 2017, ‘Barriss [the Swatter] falsely claimed he was at the address […], that he’d just shot his father in the head [and] was holding his mom and sister at gunpoint.’ This was not true. The only purpose of the call was to get the police to take drastic action. ‘Wichita police […] surrounded the address given by Gaskill. Seconds later, 28-year-old Andrew Finch exited his mom’s home and was killed by a single shot from a Wichita police officer.’ Swatting is a potentially deadly crime, and it can be done anonymously using only your address.

[Jordan Mathewson was Swatted live on Twitch as he streamed under the name ‘Kootra’ in 2014. Luckily, this incident resolved peacefully. A video of this event has over 700 000 views]

Newspaper The Independent reported in 2019 that ‘Sexual grooming crimes have soared by a third in a year as paedophiles turn to Instagram to target children as young as 11.’ While Instagram does require account creators to be at least 13 years old, the methods to enforce this rule is severely lacking. Young people who are unaware of the risks could lie about their birth year. Regardless, these children could be targeted by paedophiles looking to lure the children into compromising situations.

The ability to commit these crimes on SNS websites is partially the fault of the service provider. It can be likened to date-rape: If one person gets drugged, then the blame lies with the perpetrator, but If half the bar is unconscious, and the other half only isn’t because they’re a SWAT team who just showed up, then the blame is no longer solely on the perpetrator’s head. Social media sites give us a plethora of affordances, but as the provider of those affordances, they also need to take responsibility in ensuring the safety of the users while they explore those features. Or, at the barest minimum, work towards ensuring that users or their guardians are aware of the risks before they are forced, potentially fatally, to learn the hard way.

    References

                           Bulman, M., 2019. Sexual grooming crimes soar by a third as paedophiles turn to Instagram. [online] Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/sexual-grooming-instagram-social-media-children-paedophile-children-sex-a9099016.html. [Accessed 10/03/2021].

Kerbs, B., 2019. Man Who Hired Deadly Swatting Gets 15 Months. [online] Available at: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/09/man-who-hired-deadly-swatting-gets-15-months/. [Accessed 10/03/2021].

Face-to-face communication is becoming increasingly outdated. Or, at least, that’s an idea that has been growing increasingly popular. Caroline Tagg, in her book Exploring Digital Communcation: Language in Action wrote that ‘one consequence of the way in which social media pervades our lives [is that] we are forgetting essential conversational and interactional skills (according to popular media accounts).’ (Tagg, 2015. P.78) The idea that social media is pushing us into a recluse lifestyle is growing steadily more popular.

This idea is flawed. It necessitates the understanding that face-to-face communication and internet-only communication are separate things. And that isn’t true. In the age of the Covid-19 virus, it couldn’t be more apparent with the rise of Zoom, Microsoft Teams and - to a lesser extent - Skype and Discord, that face-to-face communication across the internet is growing increasingly popular.

Even social media platforms entirely dedicated to face-to-face communication are emerging. Omegle, a site where strangers are paired with each other to communicate, implemented a video mode in 2012. This allowed users to communicate with each other at random, or to be paired based off of a specific subject matter to discuss.

Even more recently, a large step was taken towards creating a fully face-to-face social media system through the internet. VRChat is a 3D space accessed through virtual reality where people can meet up, communicate, play games, and generally socialise and meet new people. You can friend specific people, message them, coordinate get-togethers in-game, or just go around meeting people from all over the world. Though people’s actual faces are rarely used as their avatars, the VR motion controls ability to display body language is a monumental step forward.

[User KarashuHD sings Can’t Help Falling In Love, by Elvis Presley in a VRChat karaoke lounge. This was recorded and uploaded to Youtube by user NadditionVR.]

Facebook acquired VR technology development company Oculus in 2014. In 2019, as news website Little Black Book reported, ‘Facebook announced it was building Horizon - a virtual reality sandbox universe - that builds on previous social VR attempts.’ Facebook is the first large SNS company to begin investing in VR technology as a platform for a face-to-face social media network.

[Horizon uses an avatar creation system which limits the possibilities for customization. This would prevent users from using explicit or non-human avatars like what is possible in VRChat.]

The future of VR is hopeful. Soon, technology will develop further to the point of allowing facial expressions. At that point, the line between social media and face-to-face communication will be more greyed than ever. The future of communication is not one where face-to-face interaction is dead, nor is it one where the internet pushes us to control what elements of ourselves we show to others through funnels of text. The future of communication is one where social media allows us to form communities outside of the limitations of physical location, and where people can display or hide as much of themselves as they desire to.

    References

Tagg, C., 2015. Exploring Digital Communication : Language in Action. Taylor & Francis Group. ProQuest Ebook Central [online], Available at: http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/anglia/detail.action?docID=2011257. [Accessed 10/03/2021].

Naddition [screen name], 2018. [VRChat] Funny Karaoke night with Naddition, Macrackle & ReesesSkater. [video online]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sxQmVLpzHU&t=1s. [Accessed 10/03/2021].

Ewan Clayton, external adviser to the British Library’s 2019 exhibition Writing: Making Your Mark, wrote in his article Where did Writing Begin that the first written language of Cuneiform was invented in Mesopotamia. Monks at the time kept supplies in their monasteries. In order to keep track of it all, they carved pictures into clay tablets. For each bag of grain, for example, they would carve a tally next to a picture of grain. But monks were busy people; they didn’t have time to spend drawing grain pictures over and over for each tablet.

[image is from the Extra Credits video The History Of Writing]

Those grain pictures devolved into an abstract shape that became what we now know as a letter. Writing was created out of a necessity to express complex concepts efficiently.

Smartphones are pushing writing even further towards this goal of efficiency.

Beth Watson, in her article All the English Internet Slang You Need to Know in 2020, outlines a list of twenty-five essential-to-understand slang terms used online. Twenty-three of them are acronyms. And all of them are five characters or shorter. This propensity towards shortening communication is no accident, but the same literary evolution the monks of Mesopotamia had; to communicate the same amount of information using less effort.

These new words were born largely on the smartphone. The increased effort needed to type on a SmartScreen when compared to writing or using a keyboard naturally discourages longer terms or phrases. Having easy-to-access shorthand is useful. But that’s the thing; these are new words. Though they begun life as simple shorthand, many people in our society now understand much of internet shorthand to be an aspect of our language.

In that sense, this evolution of language is similar to slang. A small community begin using a certain phrase, and it grows and grows until it leaks out of that community and affects the language as a whole. The difference is that the community isn’t all in one place; they’re everywhere.

But to return to the question: are smartphones having an impact on literacy?

Yes.

They’re making literacy rates go up.

UNESCO stated in their report Reading in the Mobile Era that ‘hundreds of thousands of people in countries like Nigeria, Ethiopia and Pakistan are reading full-length books on mobile phones.’ In addition, many of these people are using their mobile phones to text each other. This has allowed poorer countries where books and reading materials are scarce to educate more of their citizens in literacy through the convenience of communication and access to reading materials that the smartphone provides.

[Image was taken by Kuwar Singh. India is one of the countries that the UNESCO report studied.]

This is backed up further in a UNESCO article regarding this same report, which states that ‘both men and women read more cumulatively when they start reading on a mobile device.’

In these poorer countries, literacy rates are going up thanks to the access and convenience provided by the smartphone.

  References:

Clayton, E., 2019. Where did writing begin?. England: British Library [online]. (Available at: https://www.bl.uk/history-of-writing/articles/where-did-writing-begin). [Accessed 12/03/2021].

The History of Writing - Where the Story Begins - Extra History. 2016. [video, online]. United States of America: Extra Credits. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyjLt_RGEww. [Accessed 12/03/2021].

[author unknown], 2014. Reading in the Mobile Era. Paris: UNESCO [online]. (Available at: https://en.unesco.org/news/reading-mobile-era-0). [Accessed 12/03/2021].