Άρθρο από το blog: A student's opinion - Φοιτητική Άποψη:

THIRD YEAR OF studies as a Communication and Internet studies student at CUT  – Cyprus University of Technology, Second semester of the year! One of the most interesting courses I had for this semester was the Internet and Society, which consisted of EVERYTHING. With Course coordinator Mr Christopher Kyriakides , it was a course that most of my professors had a lecture each in their own respective subjects.

The Subjects consisted of:

• Social Networking – From a Sociological Scope (Dr Dionysis Panos )
• e-Government – Where both hardware and software promote democracy and bureaucracy (Dr Demetra Milioni)
• Online Journalism – Representations of media online, online sources, practices and audiences (Dr Vaia Doudaki)
• Acoustic Identity – Where Radio Meets the Web (Dr Angeliki Gazi)
• Cyber Crime – It is Information Society and NOT Internet Law, ethical questions and discussions in class, quite enlightening (Dr Christopher Kyriakides)
• Recommended Systems – Or Recommendation Systems, how, who and what are the practises, needs of systems that tells us what we might like (Dr Nikos Tsapatsoulis)
• Learning In the Information Age – Because Learning Never Ends, but also we are already at a point of Lifelong Learning which the computers and the Internet promote with incredible results (Dr Eleni Kyza)

THE WHOLE COURSE was based on the promotion of critical thought in the age of Information. There were a lecture plus a discussion of the topics from the technological and the ethical side of the subject/problem or discussions concerning what should be done and how it will be done in the future (where possible).

AS COURSE REQUIREMENT, each student had to choose four(4) of these subjects, in order to answer one of their essay question. I chose Cybercrime, New Technologies in Learning, Recommendation Systems and e-Democracy. Following, I will give an abstract of each essay and upload them for anyone who would like to use them in any way!

IN THE BEGINNING, was Cybercrime … The question was “Is Netiquette Enough?”.

The essay begins with a brief explanation of Netiquette from wikipedia.org and then goes to the problem. The problem is that Internet is different than the offline world, but still is a part of it. The power of the web is partly due to anonymity and people who believe themselves to be deviant (different) use it consciously or not to do unlawful actions (in some cases, we are talking only about criminal behaviour here). However, there is the freedom of information in the web, where it collides with all the material copyright laws of the offline world.

My main question in the essay, is about laws. Because each country already policies its own web-space and most countries have some laws, however others have none. The real problem is when a country is responsible for judging who. The question here is that someone has made a crime, should he be judged by the country he is a citizen, the one with the server on it, the one the crime took place (it could be 2-3 countries in the same time), it could also the country of the ISP or multiple countries asking for the “suspect”. So, the real question is Who is responsible and what is the law that should be used each time? Either netiquette or a series of laws, whatever the case these should be international and cover all the varieties of culture in the web, ideologies and opinions.

The whole document can be found in my new blog (which is just this one transfered at selfhosted and being updated) at http://empneusmeno.com/2011/08/02/internet-and-society-%E2%80%93-essays-part-14/