Who Make Shadows

    Have you counted the cost of spending time on looking up other people’s tweet or post?

Perhaps many people are spending a lot of times on Internet. When we wake up, we check new

posts on Facebook. When we before eat delicious food, we take a picture in order to upload it as

a new post to Tweeter or Facebook. Recently, I read the essay, “Allegory of the Cave”, written

by Plato. It was written around 600BC ago, but the allegory that Plato used can apply to our

lives. In his allegory of the cave, Plato describes the prisoners who are chained into the cave so

that they can’t move. However, they can only see the shadows that are made by the other people.

When I read this description, the Social Network Service(SNS) environment occurs to me.

    Of course SNS has positive functions. Sometimes SNS provides useful information, such as

sale information, world trending news. Now look at our Facebook timeline. The news feeds are

plastered with pictures of our friends. They upload the pictures with happy faces, beautiful places

and delicious meals. However, we can also easily find meaningless posts, and hardly find sad

faces on the SNS, because nobody wants to share that emotion. These useless post and happy

face are like the shadows that Plato describes. We can’t find the real emotions of our friends.

Their real emotions are hidden in the online posts, pictures, and videos. We are only seeing the

shadows that are made by our friends.

    Sometimes the posts can affect our mood. Many people start their day check new posts from

SNS. Again, the posts are plastered with positive words and images. If the person has

psychological problems such as, depression, they might compare another person’s artificial

life(the shadows) to the own life. By comparing others lives can’t help to improve the mood.

    I have talked mostly about the bad impacts of SNS, but it has also positive sides. I usually

check the group events that I join so that I can’t forget the date. However, I am trying to avoid

the upload the posts, because I know those can affect other people’s life, and I don’t want to

spend my time to upload meaningless postings. I want to say instead of remaining in the cave

and looking at shadows, we should get out of the cave. We should enjoy the real trees, fresh air

and sunshine.

Thoughts about Gamergate

    I was secretly trying to connect to the internet through a phone cable to play StarCraft 1. I didn’t care how much the phone bill would be.  This was the very first moment that I played the game with the other players by using an Internet service. I remember the moment. I could express my own feeling to other people who lived in the virtual world even though we hadn’t met each other face to face. I was getting used living in web. When I played games, sometimes I met people who were rude by speaking bad words. However, I wasn't concern too much about these problems because those were only limited in games.
 

    I recently heard the news about Gamergate. The story and timeline about Gamergate is so complicated. Still now, I am not sure which information is true. Basically, the woman who made the game, “Depression Quest”, was attacked by the netizens, because the her ex-boyfriend exposed the uncertain fact that she had a disorderly life with others. Then the media published many articles about her and gamers, such as “The end of the gamer” and “facing misogyny in the video game world”.

    I thought many activities that happened inside the web can't affect to real life, but I was wrong. The meaningless of one sentence of tweet, and one like button can affect other people’s life. The issue of Gamergate started with one minor wrong information that came from the woman’s ex-boyfriend, and then the problems were getting bigger and bigger. The netizens who live in the web helped to spread out the information. The tweeters blamed her by using the hashtag, "#gamergate" While the wrong information floated on the web, and the woman was attacked by netizens, Other issues also came up to the surface of the web, such as feminism in games, and white man supremacy. 

    I want to mention the danger of misinformation and revelation of personal information. As we heard the news of Gamergate, we tend to easily believe uncertain information on the internet. I think we need to have the eye that can distinguish the information whether it is true or not, and we have to be aware that our minor action on the web can ruin one person’s life. Even if the people have secret crime or have wrong life, he or she shouldn’t be punished on the web. It is too dangerous to handle with netizens, who wear the mask that we can’t see the face.