The rise of social media and its impact on news media industries has been making headlines for a number of years. Social media is tipped to transform the newspaper industry. If searching for news was the most important development of the past decade, sharing news may be among the most important of the next, says the Pew Research Centre. Today, debates about the impact of social media on the news industry rage on most recently provoked by proposed staff cuts and restucturing at both Fairfax and News Ltd in Australia.
'People got tired of cities after the war, and they are getting tired of the Web, too. Don't get me wrong: I love the Web, but it's a wild and dangerous place. It's a teeming commercial city. It's haphazardly planned. Its public spaces are mobbed' (Virginia Heffernan, 2012).
HOW do you find your way around the city when you don't have a Google map? Where is the app to help you find your way around the web?
Sure, a number of directories and sites exist online -- some very thorough -- but for the most part the web is like a crowded, sometimes unsafe and scary, city.
With almost 11 million Australian users linked in some way to social media champion Facebook -- not to mention Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, Pinterest and the list goes on -- is it any wonder the web seems infinite? The question is, how do we navigate the online world, with its back streets and alley ways, safely?
In 2008, John Maritotti, author of The Chinese Conspiracy and cyber-attack expert, claimed social media was an invitation to "at best, uncontrolled and permanent over-exposure and at worst, identity theft or misuse". We've come a long way since 2008. In fact, we've come a long way since the late 1990s when fears of identity theft, identity confusion and deception shaped our engagements with online communication technologies - or CMC, computer mediated communication, as it was known at the time.
