Are we teetering on the brink of a dangerous Internet? Are the misanthropic hordes at the door? The recent, appalling, threatening, behaviour towards Kathy Sierra plumbs a new depth from the counter-community that signals a warning that we must heed and from which we must develop strategies to protect our privacy, publicity and physical safety.

The strength and beauty of the Internet is the ease with which we can communicate, form networks and broaden our social and intellectual horizons. Communities can form across a myriad of related and, more interestingly, unrelated topic threads. We can share our passions and interests and we can share our lives.

The Internet has proven to contain a rich vein of humanity, of bonhomie and been a huge spur for intellectual discovery. I can say without doubt that I have met hundreds of individuals both at conferences and through the ether who are an affirmation of the good that can come of this overarching medium. It is hard for me to recall a single exception.

However, I have the nagging feeling that I’ve been myopic. The Internet that I see – my Internet, if you will – is an exciting place of social software, like-mindedness, sharing, caring and interacting; it’s a place of interaction and productivity the like of which we’ve not seen before. When I stand back, though, I’m reminded that it’s not all sweetness and light. Take the thousands of spam and scam emails that assail my inboxes each year; take the port-scans and virus payloads; take the bigotted, blinkered and polarised comment threads that infest the fora associated with newspapers and current affairs sites; take the humourless, crass and utterly childish “comments” that regale YouTube posts; take the use of encrypted email and chat-rooms that coordinate acts of terror and crime; take the sick and threatening behaviour towards Kathy and you see that all is, indeed, not sweetness and light.

The freedom to connect, to express, to interact is not only available to us but is equally available to those malignants that wish ill on the world. The information we publish about ourselves; our beliefs; our values our physical and geographical states all reveal potential vulnerabilities to our privacy and our well-being. For every picture we put on Flickr; for every personal musing we tweet or blog, we reveal something of ourselves to the vast majority – to whom we wish to reveal – but also to the minority who may bite back.

The Internet was built upon openness, on gentlepersons agreements, on equitable interconnectedness and the free passage of data – it was built on trust. Spam, viruses and threats of a tiered Internet reveal those foundations to be shaky, as do criminal and spiteful characters hiding behind cloaked identities. Added to which, legislation has not kept up with the pace of change and has difficulty with an international jurisdiction.

How do we strike a balance between publicity and privacy; between vigorous debate and sniping; between individuality and anonymity? How do we broaden our audiences and our circle of friends while keeping the voyeurs and advantage-takers at bay? Building walls around our opinions and knowledge, restricting our art and literature to a hand-picked clique does not seem like a step forward. Perhaps we need a new framework of trust and responsibility. We must work to ensure the golden age of the Internet is ahead of us not merely a fading memory.