Mission 7 Extra
Posted by Adrian on September 24, 2009 at 6:10 p.m.
We've all got a mate who's a bit of a gossip. Tell them a secret and by lunchtime all of your friends (and most of your enemies!) know about it.
The internet is like that person - it spreads information around. It helps us to invite people to parties, share that video you made with your mates, and keep up with the latest events on Twitter, Facebook and the BBC.
It also helps organisations, charities and political parties too - Barack Obama's campaign used the internet to help raise almost half a billion pounds from over 3 million people across the US!
The Network Effect
We're all connected with our mates in groups, and those groups are connected up to other groups, and so on. We're all much closer to each other than we think, and we're sharing - ideas, videos, opinions, mp3s, emails, advice, gossip - more and more every day.
Which is why, once something's out there, it's almost impossible to predict how it will spread. Fun and useful information spreads, but so do rumours and misinformation - as Max found out! Just because something's popular or repeated on the internet - like a free music festival in Driffield - doesn't necessarily mean it's true. It's a good idea to check important facts with lots of different sources, online and offline.
Overshare!
Max's party is a good example of sharing that goes wrong in other ways. Lots of the people driving to the party had mobiles with GPS tracking, which can help people find their way round.
That's handy for those of us who are rubbish at directions, but Max was able to use their mobile updates to Twitter to find their exact GPS location - this let him (and you) set up roadblocks and diversions to keep them away from his pub. Lucky for Max: but those partygoers probably didn't even realise that they were broadcasting their location to the world!
Smokescreen is a cutting-edge game about life online, on a new social network called White Smoke.
Explore websites, search for clues, receive phone calls, chat on IM, and tackle puzzles and minigames. On Smokescreen, who can you trust? Find out more...
