Script+Draft+(in+progress)

Media Script We live in a world where you can talk to strangers all over the world. You can tell the world about your life in 144 characters or less, keep tabs on your friends, and broadcast yourself to millions. You can reveal your most intimate secrets to an anonymous audience; you can go shopping in your pyjamas. You can learn things. Or not. You can even start over and create a virtual self, in a virtual world.

Welcome to the Internet. If we’re honest, we don’t really know what we’d do without it. It’s changed our world. But it hasn’t always been like this. (Life Before Google) “I just thought of something I’d like to know more about.” “That’s a damn shame.” +++  It all began in the 1990s when the Internet, previously restricted to privately run service providers, became available for wider use. +++ Little did they know that technology in the following twenty years would advance so rapidly. Computers have gone from being calculators and word processors to being sleekly designed, intuitive, multi-functioning machines. Today, typing something into Google, you can gain access to millions of search results in less than a second. The average person spends 5-6 hours per day on the Internet. It is believed that __% of this time is spent on leisure, and __% on work. *This statistic would probably be drastically different if students had been the only ones who were surveyed! That amounts to ___ years in their lifetime. So what we are we doing online? Exhibit A: Facebook. Facebook is a social networking site that allows you to connect with just about everyone you know. Or have met. Once. At that party. And then never talked to again. You can post unrealistically flattering photos of yourself, or not-so-flattering photos of your friends in compromising situations. You can keep tabs on somebody’s every move – how much sleep they got last night, what songs they’re listening to, who they’re friends with. You can plan your social life, but this in itself can be dangerous. Take Kate’s party for example. Kate’s party appeared to be a casual birthday get-together at Kate’s apartment in Adelaide, Australia. Only the creator of the event neglected to set the event to “Private” – resulting in hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world claiming that they would be attending. As it turned out, the party was a hoax, and in fact Kate doesn’t exist – however the man who engineered this hoax, David Thorne, said that his point about how things can go viral through websites like Twitter and Facebook had been made. So what about privacy? Facebook’s privacy settings can be relatively good – if you know to adjust them. By default, your whole world is on show for anyone who happens to type your name into the database. But is this really such a recent development? In medieval times, there was no such thing as privacy. People lived in small village communities and cramped houses, and as the Internet hadn’t been invented yet, people had nothing better to do than to exchange gossip and rumours. Nobody was ever alone. Apparently this whole idea of privacy is a relatively modern invention.  (Don’t know what point to make here! Need some time to think/talk about it...) For some people, however, privacy isn’t an issue. It’s as if people have forgotten that millions of flesh-and-blood, judgemental fellow humans have access to that video of them [insert embarrassing/shocking descriptions of things people show on YouTube here!] The Internet creates the illusion of unreality, and it nurtures anonymity. Recreating your identity is entirely possible – you are in control of what you choose to reveal, unless of course somebody reveals things for you.  Exhibit B: SecondLife  (Interview) Exhibit C: Chat Roulette When 17-year-old Andrey Ternovskiy created Chat Roulette, he hadn’t intended it to be the global phenomenon that it is. He made it for fun, so that he’d have something cool to do with his friends. But who could have predicted how this simple idea could take over the Internet?   Chat Roulette doesn’t require you to sign up or sign in (again with the anonymity thing). You don’t create an account, you simply type in the address, click “New Game” and begin. You are then linked up via webcam to a random user anywhere in the world. If you don’t like what you see (which, as many an innocent user had discovered, is highly likely) you can “Next” them. That is, if they don’t beat you to it. Sometimes it can take only a couple of seconds to be “Nexted,” owing to the fact that many people are on there looking for something // quite // specific. If you don’t fit the profile, be prepared to be rejected...  There is no denying that Chat Roulette is a fascinating concept. It seems to crystallise and take one step further what has been going on in cyberspace for years now – that is, people from scattered parts of the world connecting on a screen. But it could also be said that this site reveals something disturbing about modern society and the ways in which we relate and communicate as humans.   (Conclusions about effects of Chat Roulette)