The media phenomenon of nasza-klasa.pl

The media phenomenon of nasza-klasa.pl

Wroclaw, Poland, January 2006:
- Do you think we can do it? – asked Michał.
- Yes, we can do it. An Internet Web Site, where you can find your friends is a good idea. – said Maciek.
- Maybe, who knows? – added Paweł.

Wroclaw, Poland, July 2006:
- We have the name of the domain, let’s start!

Wroclaw, Poland, November 18, 2006 was the opening date of the official internet web site named nasza-klasa.pl. This is a Web Site for “people with class”, as they said. The idea was easy: keep in contact with friends and share memories from the college where you studied. It was only a naive wish. Finally not only current college and university students participated in this project, but also many people who studied decades ago and also many teachers, universities, government institutions, factories, work groups, churches and neighborhoods. Many Polish families shared in this project. Officially, about 14 million Polish people (more than 30% of Polish population), located in many different places in the world, share information and look for access to the 500 million pictures made by their own hands.

My friend Jacek looks every day for his wife and son’s pictures on nasza-klasa.pl web site. His wife and his son live in the north part of Poland; he lives in Chicago. “It is the only way to see every day the new pictures, the whole family together. I will be back to my family at the end of December – he sad – but I don’t have any idea how to live without this web site. Today it is really impossible…”

The portal is also shared by many who are looking for friends, lovers, and… hackers who tried to get personal addresses and private information from the biggest unsafe computer data base in my country. It has more than CBŚ[1] data base, one of the biggest in Poland. Many hackers created a small group to share information on how to crack this page. For many of them it is an honor to break into this portal.

Officially, nasza-klasa.pl is worth about 150 billion PLN[2] (about $75 billion) from a few thousand PLN at the beginning. The Tax Department was very interested about payroll. GIODO, the official General Inspector of Protection of Personal Data in Poland was interested about safety and privacy. It was not only a problem to know about names, dates of birth and addresses, but also about information from pictures which are located in every personal profile. Everybody can see where the people spend their free time, vacation time and with whom they are spending it. You can check connections between people and this is not safe. For example, a Polish lawyer put her name, pictures, address and private telephone number on this page. A few weeks later someone threatened her at her house. Another woman cheated on her husband. He discovered that she spent her vacation time with her lover. The husband checked her lover’s profile where he put by an oversight one picture with her.

Copyright is another problem. It is not legal to impersonate another person. Many participants create in private profiles of Legolas and Gandalf (The Lord of the Rings movies), or Madonna, Michael Jackson, actors, movie stars, or any pop culture media personalities. Questions are now asked about the responsibility of anonymous people on nasza-klasa.pl.

Today, nasza-klasa.pl portal is not only a web page where people share information, but also the place where you can take a journey about the needs of Polish people and traditions. This “cultural mix” gives information to sociologists, to psychologists, to media studies and to politics research. TV Stations, Radio Stations, Press and Internet News share information about this media phenomenon, made by a few students, who just wanted to create something to share small interpersonal relations. Unconsciously they created a “media machine” absorbed by Polish people all over the World.

1. CBŚ was created in 2000, after the example of FBI in USA, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBS
2. PLN, The currency code to the Polish złoty, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLN