The reading for this week covered issues concerning the dangers of the Internet. For Danah Boyd’s the dangers of the Internet include cyber-bullying, sexual perversion, and misinterpretations and mislabeling that result from parental intervention. However, at the moment there is another more politically fueled danger that is living within these digital social spaces, ISIS. This relatively young political group, serving as a radically different alternative ideological force in the Islamic world, has been using social media to get in contact with teens and other individuals to recruit and enlist them in their violent political agenda. The political organization, which has made itself globally recognized for its brutal and horrific fighting techniques, has taken advantage of the generally young age demographic present on these Social Media sites and their vulnerability to push their political ideology. ISIS’s knowledge of Social Media sites and the internet allows them to manipulate and create appealing digital personas, in the hopes of targeting a confused and lost teen or younger individual who will then accept this political agenda as truth. ISIS, knowing that the digital world has created space for the lost or confused individuals to interact and exist, the group uses anonymity and the less defined features of the web to find and contact these people.
This current phenomenon represents the pinnacle of all parental fears regarding the Internet. It is in these moments that the Internet proves its ability to manipulate and convince the weak willed individual to act, a demonstration of the true power that the Internet holds. And as more and more western young-adults enlist themselves in the ISIS regime, what does this say about the current state of our ideological existence? How does this change the conversation about the Internet and social media and young individuals relationship to both? Here, the Internet becomes a place in which individual agency and ideological belief dissipates into nothingness, the individual solely becomes a representation of a tangible existence. Culture has no bearings, and the individual succumbs to the power of “truth”. The persistence of ISIS on the Internet illustrates the power of the digital world we have created.
http://abcnews.go.com/International/isis-threat-home-fbi-warns-us-military-social/story?id=27270662