I feel that the internet gets an undeservedly bad reputation - it has to do with those very rare but highly publicized horror stories.
No one rants about the dangers of meeting a new person by other means - as if to say that such crimes had not existed throughout human history without aid of the internet. The truth is there are bad people in the world, and there aren't any more or any less of them online. Yet for some reason the internet has gained this reputation. It doesn't make much sense.
I recall reading an article that debunked the supposed dangers of online dating. The statistics were very interesting. An estimated tens of thousands of people meet in person after talking online every month, there are hardly but a few reported incidents of any nasty situations occurring in turn. In fact the gross majority of people who meet through social networking sites, whether for dating, gaming, trading, etc report very high rates of satisfaction with such interactions. The internet has become an almost indispensible tool for human communications.
But naturally people hear of those few incidents and start freaking out about how it shows that meeting or dealing online is so dangerous. The article took its best turn however when it started talking about the unending number of murders, rapes, robberies, etc that take place when people encounter each other by other means. According to one statistic, a woman is literally millions of times more likely to get raped by a neighbor, coworker, schoolmate, casual acquaintance, a perfect stranger, or even a family member than she is by anyone she might meet online. The same goes for robberies/muggings, etc - for every one internet meeting related story like the horrible thing that happened Dr. Awkward's friend, there are literally millions of crimes like that and worse which are committed each and every day with absolutely no connection to internet networking. You are thus millions of times more likely to be the victim of a crime not related to internet dealings than you are by one that is. Yet for some reason the internet is handed some sort of boogeyman status. Why do you think this is? I am never able to theorize the reasoning.
I feel it is dangerous because it inadvertently downplays the far more volatile "real world" of which we have no control. At least with the internet we can have the option of picking and choosing who, what and where we involve ourselves. With that in mind, consider how the more we emphasize the dangers of the internet (especially to children) the more we are unintentionally downplaying those dangers of physical life. I'm not saying we shouldn't practice serious safety with internet networking, but that we shouldn't get so carried away with it that we forget how much more dangerous the supposed real world is.
I recall the first time I started thinking about this topic - several years back I had a friend who was always complaining that she couldn't find a good guy. For several weeks she was talking to someone on a dating site and telling me about how much she was interested in him but that it was too bad he's an "internet" guy so they'll never meet. She didn't see any irony in the fact that I was an "internet" guy before I met some of the girls I had dated and that she knew me as a safe person to be around. This still didn't convince her to meet anyone from online and she eventually started dating someone she met at her yoga class. Long story short, after two dates she decided she wasn't interested and he decided become a really creepy stalker to the point where not only did she have to lose out on her yoga classes, she had change her phone number and her email address.
Then I recalled where I met the girl who eventually became my scary stalker - at a diner. Of the several girls I've met through the internet, not one ever turned out to be dangerous or threatening in any way. Yet the diner girl...yeah, had me scared for my safety for a long time.
In fact tonight I read an article about a woman who was gang raped after having come out of a Chinese take out place. Six guys waited for her to come out and jumped her. She had no control over this situation - she was simply going about her business and up comes this horrible event that has destroyed her life.
I guess what I'm saying is that playing it safe is not something we need to be more worried about online than we do offline. That the internet is merely a reflection of the human world and not a place where there is any more or less danger from those with ill intentions.
Way long and rather off topic, but one of my favorite rants is the internet safety rant.
