aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

The idiocy of the mob

To all those claiming that Sarah Lacy should have been able to tune-in to the chatter and hear the feedback in the room, I’d encourage you to get real and remember just exactly what world we’re living in:

In The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet (Yale University Press, 2007), [Daniel J. Solove, of George Washington University] relates the sad story of the “Star Wars Kid.” In November 2002, an awkward and pudgy Canadian teenager used a school camera to record himself acting like a character from Star Wars, wielding a golf-ball retriever as a light saber. Some months later, some students at his school discovered the recording, and one posted it on an open file-sharing network. Within days the image of a geeky teenager playing Star Wars became the hit of the Internet.

Millions of people downloaded the video. Soon many of them used their computers to enhance it, adding costumes, special effects, even opponents for the young man to slay. Hundreds of versions still haunt the Web. Many Web sites posted nasty comments about the teenager’s weight and appearance. Soon his name and high school became public knowledge. By the time YouTube debuted in 2005, the Star Wars Kid was a miserable and unwilling star of what media activists and analysts like to call “user-generated culture.” The real-world harassment drove the kid’s family to move to a new town. He had to quit school. The very nature of software, computers, the Internet, and Google made it impossible for the young man to erase the record of one afternoon of harmless fantasy. But the technology was not at fault, Solove reminds us. It was our willingness to shame others and our ease at appealing to free-speech principles that justified such alarming behavior.

No one made any money from that or the other events that Solove offers in his new book. The problem of humiliation occurs outside the familiar political or commercial spheres. In another notable case, Solove describes the “dog-poop girl,” a young woman in South Korea who refused to pick up after her dog when riding the subway. Justifiably berated by those who shared the car with her and her dog, the woman found her life turned upside down after being publicly and globally shamed by one of those passengers, who posted photos of the incident on the Web. Solove asserts that while the woman certainly deserved criticism, and even traditional measures of local shaming, to enforce the reasonable norm of cleaning up after one’s dog, the level of vitriol and harassment that she suffered was unreasonable and disproportionate to the crime.

RELATED: In a recent ON THE MEDIA interview about his new book Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky said, “The things we’re unleashing into society by having this kind of new group capability are not entirely positive.”