Shooting the messenger
2008-08-22 09:03
Alistair Fairweather
Arthur C Clarke once wrote that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I'd go a step further and say it's often indistinguishable from religion.
On the whole us humans believe that technology will eventually solve all our problems - cure all disease for instance, and end all hunger (or at least all boredom - anyone for Playstation?)
We're just as quick to blame our shiny new deities for all our problems, shaking our fists at their cold digital treachery. And as false prophets go, the crowds rarely get more worked up than over that great satan MXit.
After all since MXit arrived on the scene the kids have clearly been out of control - running away from home, sending each other nude pictures, falling in with con men or paedophiles and most recently distributing "slut" and "bastard" lists.
Really? So teenagers never ran away from home before? I thought MXit was just an instant messaging system for phones. I didn't realise it had brainwash and teleport functions. Here's an idea: maybe they were planning to run away anyway. Maybe they were troubled or bored or just rebellious.
You could argue that MXit makes it more likely - that troubled teens are preyed on by unscrupulous men (and women) who meet them in chat rooms. The problem with that theory, as with so many "MXit is the devil" theories, is that if you apply a little common sense to the situation, it evaporates.
Say a 14-year-old sneaks out of the house to meet another 14-year-old they befriended on MXit. They arrive at the shopping centre and find a 35-year-old waiting for them. What next? Let's apply our magical common sense ointment. Voila! They scamper back home and think "Gee, that was a monumentally bad idea. I won't do that again."
The same magic potion works on so called MXit con men. Imagine some random guy you've met in a chat room promises to whisk your whole family off to England where celebrity chef Jamie Oliver is going to help cure you of cancer, and promises to buy you a new house and a new car. With a dose of our potion no one would fall for such a story - but the Clurs did, all five of them.
Blame game
And that's the nub of the problem - technology can't cure stupidity or poor parenting but neither can it be blamed for these things. You wouldn't blame the car for running over a pedestrian - you'd blame the drunk driver.
And that's why it's supremely irritating that the crook who swindled the hapless Clurs is dubbed the "Mxit con man". If he had met them in an aisle of their local Pick 'n Pay, would he be the "canned fruit and nuts con man"? Con artists don't need MXit. They have been doing just fine without it for millennia. The only reason they are on MXit is because that's where 7.5 million other South Africans are.
MXit attracts paedophiles for the same reason - sheer scale. The thing is, many convicted online perverts will tell you that meeting kids in chat rooms isn't as easy as you think. Modern youngsters are wary and savvy from a surprisingly young age.
Besides, it's far easier to get your hands on children as, say, a soccer coach or a scout master. Why spend months trying to get one good kid to sneak out of the house to meet you when you can get permission slips for a camping trip from a dozen trusting parents?
And as for the "Slut" and "Bastard" lists - teenagers have been making these kinds of mean documents for decades. MXit was merely a transmission mechanism - it could just as easily have been e-mail. Long before all these gadgets we already had an effective and untraceable medium - it's called malicious gossip.
Then again
So MXit and technology in general is blameless and pure as the driven snow, right? Wrong. These new technologies do demand new safeguards - not because they are inherently more dangerous than real life, but because they have the potential to be safer than it.
This is really, as the cliché goes, an opportunity rather than a problem. We will never be able to manually monitor communication in a digital age - the scale is just too vast. It would quickly become a police state with one half of the population always watching the other (which would make for tedious television).
No, the solution is the machines themselves. We need them to understand us better, and report on our behaviour more accurately. We need, for instance, automated bots that pretend to be vulnerable children in order to detect possible perverts. In short we need artificial intelligence.
If that sounds like something out of Terminator, that's because it could well be. When we finally make machines that learn and think, and ask them to solve all our problems, we will need to be sure they don't turn the missiles on us. Because they would be right - we are the problem. Fortunately we are also the solution.
Full disclosure: our holding company, Naspers, owns 30% of MXit. I, on the other hand, own 0% of MXit - something I'm still kicking myself about.
Alistair Fairweather manages a suite of social media products at 24.com
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