Discussion task 1
My first experience of the internet was when my mother was chatting to a housemate about it and he offered to show her how it worked at his workplace - he worked for a government (health) research area that had a couple of computers connected. I do remember very vividly that the browser was Netscape, which seems to have morphed into Mozilla Firefox. But, the idea of the internet and the web was too abstract and I had no point of reference for how it could work for me. It was another two or three years before I worked in a place where it was available. While we had networked computers only one communal station had access to email and internet and someone (me) checked a couple of times a day. Internet browsing was limited, and for the most part, because it was a design industry not really used a great deal due to file size and speed. I think it's only been the last 6 or so years where it started to become accessible at home - affordability of services and hardware (my first modem was about $300 - now the same modem or better is less than $100). Even have two services - ie. home via landline and 3G via ipad, is not unreasonable. Not to mention the inclusions on mobile phones/pdas. When I think about it, it's become broadly accessible around the world in an extremely short period of time. Now, I have access to the internet in any number of ways through all of my waking hours, for work and personal use. Only in the last couple of days I've been 'researching' possibilities for New Years Eve activities - very important stuff. I am constantly checking things via the web and rarely take a plunge now into something that's unknown - accommodation, I try to find out as much as I can about a place unlike the risks we used to take. There are so many review websites now, where users can provide feedback.
We were asked to comment on an internet controversy, so only this week I followed Paypal freezing Regretsy's (Regretsy: where DIY meets WTF, yes, a spoof of Etsy) account and ordering them to refund money to 'donors', because they claimed Regretsy had misused the Donation button. I couldn't look away for the following 24 hours, where social media and blogs went nuts about the evils of paypal. What could've been financially disasterous for Regretsy, as became evident by other organisations who've experienced Paypal's policing, ended up being resolved within a day or so. Paypal came under fire from many people very publicly, and word was spread very quickly - it helps when a highish profile on twitter manages to retweet about it. Bloggers analysed Paypal's policies before and after Paypal had made a statement and pointed out the problems. But, it also meant that there was a wealth of people who proposed substitutes (Paypal's lesser known competitors). I found out about it via a Facebook friends 'share'.
This incident got me thinking about governance. In the non-online world there are bodies that you can go to when this sort of thing happens - ombudsman, authorities, regulators. But, online, it's a bit harder. In this case, luckily for Regretsy, the governance came from the online community.
So were Paypal right to do what they did? Clearly, they look for odd behaviour to try to prevent fraudulent activity, which in itself is not a bad thing. After reading the correspondence between R & PP, PP's statement and analysis by bloggers there are some major issues in the way PP communicates with its users.
Which goes back to the faceless names we deal with online. When there's no or limited personal interaction is it easier or harder to be less emotionally involved or misinterpret what's being said.
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