With a smart phone, there are so many ways to connect and communicate with.
Examples are text, WhatsApp, Facebook, Email, Instagram, Snapchat, WeChat, Twitter, Line, Messenger, voice call and voice message. The last two means are increasingly in disfavour or less used, especially with those under 40 years old. Every individual can be contacted in all these separate ways - and may inadvertently miss important communication simply because he or she had no time to or simply does not check every such channel on a regular basis.
Many have turned off audio or visual notifications as their regularity can raise our stress levels, due to the sheer volume of messages, mostly unimportant, received.
Twitter encourages wording a short message quickly, perhaps with not much forethought and with a risk of messaging in the heat of the moment. Traditional letter writing may be passe but usually allows our minds and emotions to have sufficient time to settle down first.
Snapchat allows you to display images for a short while, while you can keep a long running gallery of images in Instagram. Both play on our visual responses and a picture is really worth more than a thousand words.
What is posted in cyberspace is there forever, even after the act of deleting them. The smart phone makes it so easy to post. Just reflect on Facebook, utilised by so many who are brought to grief many years later with mutterings of long ago when they were younger, not so wise and more outspoken.
Every major and minor workeable invention of humankind has been subject to perpretations of fraud, deceit and abuse. Sad but true.
Social media crimes cover the spectrum from finance to love to taking advantage of another person in various other ways. Traditional telephone landlines have already been used to manipulate on the pyschology of call recipients. So now the same bastardly approach is utilised to target social media recipients.
It can be as simply starting with the phone callers blocking out their identities or phone numbers. Therefore the recipient sees a Blocked Number on his or her phone. I am reduced to being filled with uncertainty, higher risk and hesitation to answer in such a situation.
What do you reckon you would do in a similiar scenario? Why would people block out their phone numbers when calling you?
It may be nothing sinister. Not so long ago, a previous generation picked up the landline phone naturally when it rang, with no means of knowing who called.
Yet many now do not pick up such calls. The logic now is that if it is urgent or valid enough, the caller will contact you in other ways.
Many who pick up calls with a Blocked Number can be confronted with unknown and menacing voices from the other side, a kind of Twilight Zone of experience. Worse are initial seemingly kind voices trying to eventually solicit personal data, or play on the inherent kindness and trust of innocent and well behaved citizens of our society.
Threats and scams made include a veil of extortion, a play on our potential greed (the strange caller promises of monetary gain in exchange for your personal data) and auto recorded voices stirring up fear and discontent. Seduction techniques include grooming target recipients to develop an emotional attachment to the caller to eventually extort or make the recipient part with money.
The first premise for responders like us is to quickly realise that there is no level playing field when dealing with such callers. The key response is to realise it is a dangerous game, every word of your voice can be recorded and you can fight back by contacting the entity or company the call is claimed to be made from.
This serious situation started with marketing calls made at dinnertime many years ago, with call staff pressured or induced to make hard to earn commissions at call centres. More people these days do not have a landline at home, so such calls and even more risky ones have now moved to the smart phone, which supposedly accompanies the owner everywhere.
Risky and manipulative calls and contacts are used increasingly by specific political parties to literally drive their message to the masses. These can result in fake news being disseminated by people whom you know share similar strong views with you. Think of WhatsApp. We have to really think more for ourselves and respect our own intelligence, especially when facing a barrage of cleverly modelled news communicated so easily and fast on your hand held daily companion.
This over use of such approaches have turned many people off, until they limit the use of their increasingly expensive phones.
The inherent expectation held by many that you are always by your phone has to be smashed. Even if that smart phone is on your side, there should be no expectation of users checking their phones all the time. The quality of life is enhanced when I begin to only check my smart phone at limited stages of the day.....unless it is a phone call.
If it is urgent enough, do make a normal phone call or drop by for a face to face meet up.
The easy and instantaneous delivery of videos and images can be a two edged sword. They can result in pleasure and pain - and definitely a running out of storage space on your hand held device.
Weren't we told before that hacks and non-benign viruses can be spread through email attachments, whether in text, picture or video, many years ago? Now WhatsApp offers that risky channel.
It is said the dangers are elevated the more captivating and well made the WhatsApp messages are. Just like being at a snake oil show, we as the audience must increase our caution when we are faced with loud content, less signs of validity and no acknowledgement of source ( usually "forwarded").
Do not be a used party in spreading a wildfire we may regret or really do not want to be part of.
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