Reading Assignment 8

Easychair Batmen (and batwomen)

The first part of chapter one in Shirky is something that I have experienced countless times online. I was one of that audience during the 'sidekick fiasco'. I spend a fair amount of time online, not as much as most people but definitely a good amount of my free time is spent perusing the web. My website of choice is reddit.com which is a website aggregate much like the website digg.com is which is mentioned in the article. The slogan for reddit is 'What's New Online' . It has a huge user base that upload links and whatever is voted up the most makes it to the front page. From here I am able to read things like "A New Dinosaur Was Discovered in Brazil" or "TED Talks by Gates" or even a funny picture of a Lego house. If you've spent as much time as I have looking at sites such as Digg and Reddit than you will begin to understand what will and what wont be upvoted to the front page. This is what leads me to what is discussed in Shirky's opening chapter...

One of the things that almost always become insanely popular on link aggregates or highly viewed blogs are stories of people having something stolen, needing advice in a bad way, or being screwed over. These stories, much like that of the sidekick, are followed by tens of thousands of people online in a very heated fashion; I should know, I am one of these people. There have been stories like that of the sidekick: a person setting up a site to show how he led on a Nigerian Prince scammer over the course of several months or how someone went into a Bestbuy and was scammed out of their money by Geek Squad. What these stories do to the reader is stir up emotions inside and often are the same three emotions: you either had something like this happen to you and are feeling for this person, you believe you have valuable knowledge of the situation and want to show it off, or you like watching "justice" in action. Either way these situations turn into, more often than not, intense cases of internet vigilante...ism. People like, no they love to see people get their "comeupins" and it is only sweeter when those people go down in front of an audience of millions like that of the sidekick girl.

This has me thinking though. This, while immensely entertaining, cannot be good. People are surely having their lives ruined over situations that do not necessarily warrant the kind of backlash anonymous people on the internet like to dish out. Take the sidekick girl, yes what she did was wrong but does that mean she has to be harassed by thousands of people who have no right to do so? Don't get me wrong I think that when people try to scam others they deserve to be punished, but there really needs to be a limit to the backlash that internet vigilantes deal out. It really does not speak well of our nature the way that people band together to destroy random strangers that we have never met and have only heard of through very biased channels. Are we really so easily manipulated? Is the mob mentality so powerful? Do we need to become asshole just because of our anonymity? I am of the opinion that people are not changing really, we have always been this nasty, but the internet as a tool is magnifying our ability to cause havoc in others lives where we really should have no say.