So what are the problems?

Over the weekend I tried to reconsider some of the issues we had been discussing, and thinking about what are the exact problems.

Here are a few that I came up with.

Netbullying
This has been big in the news in the past few months.
Just a few of the recent articles:
stuff.co.nz
The article mentions the NZ government has an agency to help kids with cyberbullying

sfgate.com
the second also mentions the case in missouri of a myspace hoax that ended in a girl killing herself.
washingtonpost.com

From the last article I thought this paragraph was paralleling a thought that I was having about our "problem"

"The government, in its zeal to charge Lori Drew with something, anything, has tried to criminalize everyday, ordinary conduct: the wayward or misuse of a social-network website," defense attorney H. Dean Steward wrote in a motion to dismiss that was filed yesterday.

This to me is a potential problem that has evolved - that our ordinary social definitions of acceptability haven't kept up with our technology. We talked about this in class with bebostalking, texting people on your cell phone you don't know, etc.
It used to be much more difficult for us to create false identities for ourselves and speak publicly, but with the internet we can completely fabricate everything, and in fact, as the woman in the case in missouri is arguing, it is common place. Many people have email addresses that don't indicate our real names, or online identities for blogs or other social sites that are some form of nom de guerre.

So a fundamental problem could be that we don't have a way of agreeing on acceptable internet behaviour or rewarding it.

What I find interesting about this as a problem is that it doesn't automatically lock us into a web interface change, but could actually be a problem, that requires a much more expansive thought about how we agree upon and value etiquette. It could result in a website, a device, a social system, etc.