The Internet and Reality: lacking safeguards and security

We recently watched a movie in Mass Comm called Growing up Online. This video was especially salient for me because it relates so closely to the different ways that my sister and I use the internet. The video focused a lot on how the parent’s view of the internet and its consequences differed from the teens’ views. Parents can more clearly see the full range of scenarios that can arise in the online world. Teens, in the movie at least, are a bit more short-sighted and see the online world as a place of freedom and anonymity.
My sister and I have always used the internet in drastically different ways, the media’s strong point. I usually use it for school work and surveillance; she has always used it for socializing and acquiring music and other pop culture icons of status. She has always been more at risk for “backlash” on the internet, something that she – and her teen counterparts in the film - didn’t understand, until recently. A wave of car break-in recently started happening in her college-town neighborhood. She and her friends have has their windows smashed in several times, with nothing stolen. It is likely that this is retaliation or reaction from something that was said online, and this is an admittance by my sister.
So what happens now? She has revamped the access to her profile information and gotten rid of a large portion of her online “friends” lists, but what course of action is she allowed to take to feel less like a victim? Rules are lax, if not non-existent, in the online arena. How can we feel safe, anonymous and yet vulnerable at the same time? What happens when the virtual and real world overlap?
These are a lot of questions that have come to my mind lately and I’m not sure we’re at a place where we can answer them yet. A lot of people know that they want the internet to be “safer,” but what does that mean and how do we achieve it? In class we’ve been talking a lot about technology growing faster than the society can change the content it presents, and I feel that this is another arena in which society is falling behind. It’s not for lack of trying, but technological steps forward like set time limitations on an internet provider and a clear record of sites visited by minors in a session don’t seem to be helping the parents help their kids understand the dangers and realities of this, the internet, our newest media.