Online Protection

 

I enjoy reading book reviews.  Private Eye is always entertainingly bitter and those in the Spectator often reveal quite a lot about the reviewer.  A review in the Spectator recently caught my eye: “Going Dark – The Secret Social Lives of Extremists,” by Julia Ebner.  Naturally interested in the way the internet is developing and encouraged by a positive review, I ordered the book from the Library.  Indeed, I was not discouraged that Julia Ebner writes in the Guardian and interests herself with militant responses to Brexit, according to the dust cover.  Ebner’s aim is to make the “social dimension of digital extremist movements visible,”  and then launches herself into an account of all that is terrible on the internet and her adventures in infiltrating the groups and sites involved in extremists movements.  So much for the introduction but what follows is a jargon fest account, written in the present tense, of her journey which would infuriate anyone expecting a coherent narrative.  Oh well, I thought, since I had borrowed the book I may as well read the conclusion and see if there were any recommendations for the future.  Sure enough, there were “Ten Predictions for 2025.”  Here is my precis of the revelations:

·        Online groups will spread themselves more thinly making them more difficult to track

·        Terrorists will learn from other terrorists and copy their techniques

·        People will continue to be aggrieved

·        Totalitarian States will continue to oppress minorities

·        Far right groups may turn violent

·        More types of terrorism and more terrorists may emerge

·        Terrorists might use drones

·        Terrorism may rise along with our sea levels (this was my personal favourite from Hope Not Hate)

·        More people will tell lies on the internet and try to undermine rivals (“Shitposting," “Trolling,” and “Flaming” apparently)

Eagerly, I turned to “Ten Solutions for 2020” but was disappointed.  There were a few suggestions technical techniques, all of which required someone to form a consensus and do something.  This sounds OK until one asks who are these people who should protect our lives and what will they allow or not allow us to think? There was even the bizarre suggestion to mobilise “Arts Against Anger” – more Gary Lineker perhaps? The one suggestion, it seemed to me, that had merit was “Education Against Extremism.  Ebner argues for more digital literacy programmes to provide protection for young and old alike.  There seems no doubt that this would help, even at a practical level of preventing vulnerable people becoming victims of nasty online scams.  But so-called digital literacy will be insufficient without the fundamental knowledge  together with the effective intelligence and critical reasoning power that our education system should be nurturing in young people. If we want to protect the young from harm on the internet, then we should start by looking at their basic education at school and university.