Wednesday 14 March 2012

My Social Network Stalker

I wanted to post a blog dedicated to a documentrie I have recently watched on TV, seeing as I feel it was very interesting a relevant to alot of what my blog overall talks about.
On Monday 20th Febuary 2012, a documentrie came onto Channel 4, titled, My Socail Network Stalker. In this documentrie we saw a young girl, Ruth Jeffrey who was stalked online, by her very own boyfriend. Her boyfriend had been uploading explicit images all over the internet including such websites as Facebook where even her mum was tagged in one of the photos.
The young girl actually quoted during the show "Why should one person be able to make another person feel like this" a moving quote which does make me think about how stalkers can actually react the way they do and think its "okay" to do such things to peoples lives.
The documentrie showed just how painful and upsetting cyber bullying can actually get. Ruth suspected that the reason behind such bullying from her boyfriend, was her new life away from home at University making him jealous, jealousy can truelly push people to some limits.

Monday 12 March 2012

Cyber Stalking

Stalkers are everywhere, even without us actually realising.
There are actually many different types of ways people end up getting stalked:
  • Women: When it comes to women getting stalked online, they may find that they end up getting rape threats, and postings of person info/pictures. An article I found online introduces to us that 1 in 5 women are actually stalked online, and that stalking is increasingly on the uprise. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-21634/One-women-stalked.html
  • Itimate Partners: Worringly you may also find that your partners are actually stalking you online, this is of course a form of domestic violence and also creates social isolation.
  • Anonymous online mobs: In a blog I wrote before, I spoke about Web 2.0 and it seems that Web 2.0 technologies actually enable online groups of anonymous people to target individuals. A perfect example of this is, Kathy Sierra, a young blogger who found herself recieving death threats and comments online. She quoted, "As I type this, I am supposed to be in San Diego, delivering a workshop at the ETech conference. But I’m not. I’m at home, with the doors locked, terrified. For the last four weeks, I’ve been getting death threat comments on this blog. But that’s not what pushed me over the edge. What finally did it was some disturbing threats of violence and sex posted on two other blogs… blogs authored and/or owned by a group that includes prominent bloggers." The stalking actually led to her cancelling her blog.

These statistics that I found online show the worrying truth about what we may be up against if we do find ourselves getting stalked.


  • 11% of victims were stalked for 5 years or more







  • Approximately 25% experienced some form of cyberstalking such as email or instant messaging







  • 66.2% of stalking victims experienced unwanted phone calls or messages







  • Nearly 75% of stalking victims knew their stalkers in some way





  • The fact that nearly 75% of stalking victims knew their stalkers seriously worrys me, why would people you know already need to stalk you?
    "Slightly more than 30% of stalking offenders are a known, intimate partner - a current or former spouse, a co-habiting partner, or a date."

    Author Aontonio Chacon Medina who wrote Una Nueva Cara De Internet, El A Coso which translates (A new face of the Internet: Stalking) says that a harrasar is cold, with little or no respect for others.

    Its clear that the most obvious places for stalking would be websites such as, Myspace, Facebook, Bebo, Friendstar and Twitter, places where we upload all our personal information, allowing people to know where we are, where we work, where we live, and what were up too with our hourly updates (Depending how addicted you are to posting and letting people know what your doing). We add people, and chat to people on there comfortably, but what if them people aren't who we think they are, noone actually knows whos behind a computer screen. I've even had friends admit to making a fake account on websites such as Facebook to check up on their partners, doing such things as flirting with their partners on a fake account to attempt to catch them out cheating, this deffinately worrys me, are people not allowed a private life anymore?

    I found a website online, on this website you can type your name in and see if anyone has searched you on Google, unfortunately the website did not work on my laptop, but im pretty sure it would be extremely interesting to know.

    The link I have posted above is a story about a young girl who put a classmates name on sites asking for sex. Shockingly, the stalker in this story was only 12 years old, how are our younger generation finding out about such things, luckily when I was 12 years old I was still on the Barbies!

    I found these clips online which are from a movie called Odd Girl Out, the film is about a young girl who gets quite violently cyber bullied online and shows what could really happen in the aftermath and the affect it could have on young girls. I plan to watch the movie, and will write up another blog of how it actually made me feel on a later date.
    http://youtu.be/kIjhNYX7jKo

    Overall Cyber Stalking must be stopped, it can turn girls to food disorders, put boys into hiding in fear for their life all because of the internet. The internet is an amazing place, and we should all be using it for good reasons.