Arts Hub Australia — Jimmy Wales sighs. The co-founder of online reference hub Wikipedia has arrived in Australia to take part in a series of public seminars on education and knowledge. He’s excited to be here, but he’s dismayed at a headline he’s just seen in one of our broadsheets on the evils of MySpace and that wicked World Wide Web.
The article, spawned by the tragic suicide of two young girls who happened to have a MySpace account, expresses some valid concerns about the dangers facing our kids, and a melancholy that they were forced to articulate their woes online, rather than to family. But Wales feels the piece, and others like it, do us all a disservice by scapegoating an easy target. The Internet, after all, is still the new kid on the block, and easy pickins’ for the big, bad senior class, (read, old media, socio-political establishment) who are starting to realise their tenure at the top of the totem pole is finite.
