Blogs: A Safe Sanctuary or Dangerous Den?

Hi again everyone,

The following information may be a bit disturbing for some people, as I have made links to sites that may upset or offend visitors to further analyse and explore Mortensen and Walker's excerpt.

Loci amoeni refers to an idealized place of safety and comfort. Unlike loci amoeni, blogs are not shut off from the world (Mortensen and Walker, 2002) or seen as a place of safety and comfort. It is a space that is somewhat cordoned off where someone can explore without having to reveal personal details to everyone (Matrullo, 2002).

On the one hand, one could argue that it is a place of safety and comfort, as someone writes their own thoughts down and feel better for being able to write something in metaphoric privacy. On the other hand, if their idea or topic interests enough people, it can snowball. In contrast, blogs can be altered to either show who posted it, or to be completely anonymous. While bloggers can remain anonymous, their ideas and thoughts are not. It may be a safe place for someone to express themselves without fear of getting into trouble, but in terms of voicing opinions and thoughts, it is an extremely dangerous place to be in.

One example of this is how easily terrorists around the world can get in touch with each other and disseminate ideas. Obviously, a terrorist isn’t going to divulge specific ideas and details about how they are going to carry an attack out, but because you can find almost anything on the Internet, an idea can easily turned into something more dangerous. Another example is the disturbing increase in websites promoting suicide and anorexia. In the past 12 months, there has been a disturbing increase in suicides in Wales (Britten and Savill, 2008). It appears that these teenagers only kill themselves so that a memorial website where people can write things about them is created in their memory (Britten and Savill, 2008).

On pro anorexia websites, girls and women suffering from anorexia write about how much they have eaten and how much weight they are trying to lose (livejournal.com). In some posts, there was only a bit of writing at the beginning, and then a huge white space where writing should be, and then they sign off with their name. Whether it be the fact that I am not an avid blog reader and don’t own a blog, apart from this one, I was surprised to find that when I highlighted this information with my mouse, there was writing there. But this writing was hidden for a reason - the stuff I highlighted and read was quite disturbing and detailed how much they weighed, how much they had eaten for the day and so on.

Even seemingly harmless sites such as YouTube have provided good ground for people to post videos similar to those blogs mentioned in the above paragraph. For example, the shooter from the Viriginia Tech killings posted a video on YouTube, where he talked about his ideas of killing people. While the Internet provides a plethora of useful information for a variety of topics, there is also extremely dangerous and questionnable stuff, such as the videos of the Virginia Tech atrocity, that could act as a trigger for others to follow in the same footsteps and to do the same.

If this is applied to loci amoeni, it suggests that negative and in some cases, life endangering blogs can be published to a huge audience. While I am for having the Internet as a free space for anyone to post what they want, it is also an extremely dangerous place for such ideas to linger and in some cases, to be taken seriously. I know in my previous post I said that the sharing of ideas and information is beneficial to everyone, there are blogs that contain unsavoury elements that are always going to be present, no matter how hard people try to censor and shut down such blogs.

But what can be done? I think the sharing and linking of ideas is vital for the Internet and extremely beneficial for everyone to use, but sometimes, things get taken a bit too far.