Thursday, August 03, 2006

Of Impersonating Profiles, Obscene Messages and Mysterious Calls

Someone just forwarded me this article about an upcoming wave of crime on the internet (click here to read). How the people of the fairer sex who have been impersonated on an online people networking interface called Orkut. The internet has come of an age in India and people are now becoming savvy, using all these technology in their lifestyle. I feel happy when I see around me people using messenger, reading blogs, and updating their life style with the new technologies as an integral part.of their life.

But when I read articles as the above I feel that this exposure to technology has given us a lot of power, and with great power comes a great responsibility. The perverted use the technology to pelter out there own frustrations. How can a person get pleasure in impersonating someone else in a defamatory way? What kind of sadist approach is this to life and human interactions?

The thing which makes it worst is that generally the people who do this are acquaintances or friends of the people they impersonate. I don’t understand why can’t people understand some following simple concepts especially with regards to the Internet & other technology advances-

1- If u search “Nude Pictures” in google you get already get 32,900,000 results and why on earth you find that you are doing great service to the netiezen’s as a whole by morphing the picture of a friend with vulgar and obscenity. Everyone knows it is morphed and they don’t really care, except for the person who is really getting embarrassed. So please get a life, as there are better things to do in life than morphing pictures.

2- I have yet to come across who has started of a real good relationship with lines of the genre “Can I be your friend”, “Your pic looks cute, want to be my friend”, “Your internet profile seems very interesting, I would like to know u better”. Interestingly I have seen profile of a lots of my female friends flooded with messages similar to these. And any conversations which are followed on these lines generally tend to follow on the lines of sex. Another interesting observation is that these kinds of messages are passed not to a single person but in bulk, as in it is a mass marketing mailer campaign. So if you feel or your only objective behind these mass campaigns is that you might find someone good as a friend, or might get chance to get laid or discuss soft porn. There are better ways of doing it to sending these messages to completely unknown people.

3- Another interesting breed is who are diligent enough that when they see a girl they take the effort to follow her, get hold of her phone number (I don’t know how they manage to maintain extra large phonebooks, I have troubles keeping my small phonebook updated where I have no separate group which is non acquainted with me). Then they would end up giving missed calls, obscene messages and would like to tell these ladies “That how they have fallen in love with them”. These kinds of people often send some strange kind of questions popping in my brain. How they tend to correlate which phonebook entry corresponds to which number (I feel it would be difficult if u tend to fall in love so often and specially if u haven’t seen the person u love except for once when u were following her). Regarding obscene messages all I can say if u think people laugh reading your obscene messages may be yes but if u think they think you are the seventh edition and 66th reprint of James bond then may be u r in for a surprise. They really think that you are stupid moronic ass, who doesn’t know what and where to talk. The telecom companies have reduced sms rates but that doesn’t means that gives u the leeway to message anyone, anything that u think might be interesting.

This list is not exhaustive and I can keep on adding but the bottom line is, the technology is here to improve life style and the living quotient of the civilization. Not because what one thinks might be fun and interesting. So when next time you are about to play a prank with someone using technology, ask yourself two questions. First, do you have a leeway enough on personal level to play that prank? Second, how much you yourself, or someone else may be your sister or your girlfriend or your wife would be offended if this was done to her? To end all I can say to everyone is Enjoy the technology with a responsibility....

Posted by Prats at 3:44 AM