Until fairly recently, most of what people heard through the mass media about life online has been about how your kids can access pornography, or bomb recipes, or paedophiles who are praying on the young, or fraud. There are a great many terrible things on the Internet, just as there are a great many terrible things going on in any major city, but there are a lot of good things going on as well. There is a kind of utopian hype that always accompanies a new technology, and the Internet, certainly, is no exception to that. I wrote my book, The Virtual Community , with a lot of enthusiasm about the opportunities that I found there, but I also included a couple of chapters about the dark side of this technology. Just as when somebody calls you up on the telephone unsolicited and you've never heard from them before, you're probably not going to invite them to your home, or go out and meet them in a bar.
People tend to be a little bit more trusting than they ought to be when they are online.
I think people need to be educated about the proper safeguards you should use when communicating with others online. They need to understand you're not really seeing the whole person. In fact, you're not seeing a person at all, you're seeing words on a screen and a lot is missing. You can't hear a person's tone of voice, or see their facial expression or their body language. There really is no substitute for face to face communication for a great many things, from closing a business deal to courtship.