Cyberstalking

The Narrative project was probably the part of the course that I was most looking forward to. Being able to run our own campaign (although fake) promised to be an interesting and challenging task.
So when it comes to online campaign projects the choosing of the topic for our campaign was a topic that caused a slight problem with the group of Rebecca Lucking,Emily Prue, Matthew Wilson, Katherine Downes, Holly Cook and I. What hadn't been done before that needed to be addressed? Our answer: cyber stalking.

The thought project by Simon Hogsberg shown in the new media art lecture was a particularly inspiring project. It was a great example of psychogeography as it gave me new awareness into what people that I’m walking passed everyday are thinking. Though, we couldn’t achieve something of this scale for our campaign, our aim was to also create a new track of thought in online safety for younger users in particular.We attempted to use psychogeography to try and get the same effect that the lecture showed us, a new way of thinking about aspects of the world that had been overlooked before.

"The motivations behind these works are the same as those that have driven most of twetntieth century art- ideology, technology, desire, the urge to experiment, communicate,critique or destroy: the elaboration of ideals or emotions, and memorialising observation or experience." Rachel Greene

The campaign took a while to get off the ground. We had the idea but what could we do with it to get the desired spread of our message? As we chose cyber stalking one obvious choice was over the internet. As a technologically advanced society, we are no strangers to the internet so we thought that making young people our target audience for the campaign would be appropriate. In the UK a national opinion poll survey reported that 75% of all children between seven and sixteen years old were regular internet users (Cyberspace Research Unit, 2002), which puts them at high risk of cyber stalking. As over half of the percentage of internet users the younger are more vulnerable to more mature users with less than honourable intentions. An example of this, though not within the age we were aiming to reach is still a prime example of cyberstalking, is the Pamela Gilbert story. After a casual dating period with a colleague for a brief amount of time she ended the relationship. Angered by this her colleague sent abusive emails and joined the sites that Gilbert was on to shadow her and used other colleagues as a reminder that he was there. (Bocij,2004: 177). Our campaign was slightly similar in the way we combined physical stalking with cyberstalking to enhance the realism of the video to make it appear more stark and unnerving.

The experience of making this campaign with my group has allowed me to see how my own media usage is not entirely safe or possibly even wise. I had msn messenger by 12 and accepted any user that requested to be a contact without a single thought to who it may be, the adolescent excitement of having a new contact took over logic. I think that there does need to be more funding and research put into safe internet use as younger users are on the internet everyday. Last year my six year old brother had set up a Facebook account and had set his age to eighteen as previous social networking sites such as Bebo had warned against under eighteens making their profile public, so in order to get round this he changed his age.

http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/video/video.php?v=452459200724&subj=539018316