Research question: Which cyberthreats are you most concerned about? How do you handle them?

The development of Web 2.0 technologies accelerate the speed of information communication and the degree of information sharing (Birdsall, 2007). Web 2.0 promotes the liberty to engage with, create and circulate content, and advances the financial benefits which might flow from that (Wieland, 2000). The users change their practices from information seeking, which is linear, context-binding, and goal-directed information distribution, to the easy creation, collaboration, sharing, and remixing of content of information communication (Chiang et al., 2009). The early application utilizes blog, wikis to form the personal digital library and now the users integrate the Social network sites, microblog, twitter, and other tools to build their second life (Beer, 2008). However, the attendant problems followed by diversification of information and communication are the cyberthreats, such as disorderly information, information ethics, and private information.

The disorderly information grows in the development of information sharing and the increase of information communication. The extraordinary capacity of Internet is to deliver various kinds of content for free affected by the commercialization of the Internet, either directly or through the exploitation of this kind of freedom (Allen, 2009). The phenomenon of information disorder is about the definition of information importance and information classification and decreases the efficiency of information retrieve. The current ways of ordering information include label, keyword, bookmark, users’ assessment, visitor number, relationship indicator, and so on.

The social responsibility and ethics are also the cyberthreats in Web 2.0 era. Web 2.0 technologies provide more freedom of the right to equal access to information for individuals and give more stringent requirements for the users in information access, information communication, and ethical behavior. Allen argues that the Internet does, or should, create conditions for greater personal liberty and collective liberation (Allen, 2003). Such as discussed in the blog groups, the users need to not only respect the opinions of others, but also rational express their own opinions and not hurled abuse the others who held different views. Web 2.0 environment provides easier processes for supporting the users as the consumers and providers of information. The users need to build a rapport virtual environment to share their insights with others through information literacy education, including correctly identify the authenticity of the information, expose the prejudices and fraud information, respect differences and diversity of information.

Different from the copyright problem, the privacy of information will effect person’s living online. The users are easy to upload various contents with the support of Web 2.0 technologies, such as image, audio, video, text, etc., and explore their information and tracks which other users could observe online (Beer, 2008). For these people, the Internet is already a part of how they live and a part of how they research. However, on the open environment of Internet, the personal privacy in the online information is often enlarged out of the human control to form public information and person will be faced to the pressure of the public information.

The cyberthreats are changed with the variety of information technologies and social media and are the result of the increasing speed of information dissemination and the efficiency of information routes (Cormode and Krishnamurthy, 2008). The cyberthreats of disorderly information, information ethics, and private information, which covered with scientific methods, social ethics, and legal system, are actually the problems of information literacy.

Reference:

Allen, M. (2003). Dematerialised data and human desire: the Internet and copy culture. Paper presented at: Cyberworlds, 2003. Proceedings. 2003 International Conference on (IEEE).

Allen, M. (2009). Tim O’Reilly and Web 2.0: The economics of memetic liberty and control. Communication, Politics & Culture 42, 6-23.

Beer, D. D. (2008). Social network (ing) sites… revisiting the story so far: A response to danah boyd & Nicole Ellison. Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication 13, 516-529.

Birdsall, W. F. (2007). Web 2.0 as a Social Movement. Webology 4.

Chiang, I. P., Huang, C. Y., and Huang, C. W. (2009). Characterizing Web Users' Degree of Web 2.0-ness. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 60, 1349-1357.

Cormode, G., and Krishnamurthy, B. (2008). Key differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. First Monday 13.

Wieland, J. (2000). Freedom of information. Engel/Keller.