This morning's New Zealand Herald carries the surprising news that the Blenheim branch of our police force has established a Bebo profile and hence an online presence in an attempt to "reach out to the community".
The paper has pitched this as a means to solicit anonymous tip offs, but the implications run far deeper than this. By jumping in to Bebo, they are actively moving amongst the very people who they need to get closer to in order to get to the roots of crime. This news is fantastic, but of course they should not stop there, and Facebook, MySpace and similar Web 2.0 services are surely worthy of attention as well...
This reminds me of the story last week about the "virtual arrest" of a Dutch youth for stealing some online goods in a Second Life-type social networking website:
It makes me wonder how the judge is going to handle this case. Will she / he impose a "vitual sentence"? Or something else?
In this country, instead of incarceration, we have a form of punishment known as "community service". In the online world, is some form of community service possible, should we not already be serving the community by behaving according to ethics and noble principles. This recalls a recent blog entry on the Cognitive Edge site which struck a cord with me:
[Anonymous]
Anonymous postings to blogs are welcome, but this wonderful new technology allows the malicious great scope to play havoc. There is and always be those who are ill intentioned, but one of the problems I have had in introducing social networking to the corporate environment is to set ground rules, establish levels of trust and reassure the powers that be (the ones who pay for the computers and power) that people are, for the most part, good at heart. Perhaps that is why current corporate structures are doomed, as Gary Hamel suggests in his new book The Future of Management. Because they are fundamentally based on fear and risk minimisation, hence foster a negative view of humankind which does not bear up on close scrutiny.
But that is surely a topic for another day!
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