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Now we’re all terrorists…
Second Life grows slowly, and, as any new technology, it is prone to journalistic abuse to infuse terror and panic on the mainstream masses.
This time, the threat comes from the Washington Post. There is really just one paragraph worth reading there, which is the single drop of sanity in an ocean of absurdity:
Jim Dempsey, policy director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonpartisan group that monitors privacy issues, said he heard the same worries from the government when cell phones became popular in the 1980s and again when mainstream American logged on to the Internet in the 1990s.
Of course, the rest of the article mostly ignores Jim Dempsey, travelling instead the whole road of how Second Life is being used by terrorist cells to communicate, plan, and organise their next attacks, and how the several agencies with three-letter acronyms in the US are all heading towards the virtual words to create “cyberterrorism counter-units”.
Ludicrous.
Also, this is “old news” and vastly discussed in previous years. It’s incredible how some journalists, in their eagerness to condemn virtual worlds and ruin the virtual economy and virtual societies, recycle “bad news” from the past, change the order of the paragraphs, add a few more quotes (often cited out of context), and republish exactly the same article that was written 10 or 20 years ago.
In my next incarnation, I wish I were reborn as a Luddite journalist. One could make a career out of it, just writing one single article for my whole life, and doing a search & replace on a few words every time a new paradigm-shifting technology is released…
Great, now we have to worry about the terrorist furry age-playing Gorean gambling bankers. (It’s getting hard to remember all the imagined threats these days. I hope I didn’t miss any.)
February 7th, 2008 at 5:32 pm*clap, clap, clap*
Yeah, the Post’s view is pretty skewed. However, it is actually kind of comforting to know that the US government is actually investigating virtual world technology rather than becoming completely ambivalent to it, and then try and ban it like a video game later on.
February 7th, 2008 at 8:22 pm[...] just discovered Gwyneth Llewelyn’s take on the matter. She decries the Post article as alarmist: Also, this is “old news” and [...]
February 15th, 2008 at 2:42 pm[...] Did anyone else follow this idiotic story the Washington Post did about terrorists using Second Life to plot and terrorize us? This has nothing to do with the unions, by the way - that was probably a bad transition, though they are both technically falling under the “using Second Life to organize” theme. Hmmm. Let me rant for a minute. Hey! Let’s fear technology! That’ll show the terrorists! Gwyneth Llewellyn posts a much better rant on this issue here. [...]
February 18th, 2008 at 9:28 pmSad, sad - the fear and paranoia displayed by the ignorant.
When will they learn that the devil is in the HUMANS, not the Technology?
April 9th, 2008 at 12:50 am