Blink. You read Reddit, right? Have you never noticed that every time there’s an outrageous story, everyone on Reddit bands together and does something about it? Dusty the cat? The ReMax debacle? That woman who got her cruise cancelled and the Redditors sent enough to get her a new one? Also, http://www.cracked.com/article_17170_8-awesome-cases-internet-vigilantism.html . This is pretty impressive. If I’d, say, put a big poster up in a school about Dusty the Cat or ReMax, I doubt the students would have been able to mount half as coherent or overwhelming a response as the Internet did.
And Anonymous versus Scientology was pretty impressive too.
All of these have some things in common. They’re responses to a single outrageous incident, they’re things that the mainstream media doesn’t cover, and they don’t take a huge time commitment to solve. So there is a big difference between them and, say, fighting world hunger.
But what I gather from these examples is that anonymity and the bystander effect do not suddenly change the incentive structure for people online. Possibly the best known Internet action-taking campaign ever was the anti-Scientology one perpetrated by...Anonymous.
I would suggest we shift our inquiries in the direction of why the Internet is so good at Dusty the Cat style operations and so bad at end world hunger style operations. I think it probably has to do with the way people use the Internet itself: short attention spans and novelty-seeking.
On the other hand, the Internet can pull through for people long-term: witness Howard Dean, Barack Obama, Ron Paul, and “netroots”. So maybe it has more to do with the fragmented nature of the Internet. Reddit is a natural place for Ron Paul fans to get together and organize Ron Paul related things, but there are lots of fragmented communities and none of them is specifically focused on world hunger. Nor would a sudden interest in solving world hunger on one community’s part spread to another.
I don’t know. Don’t have a specific answer. Just think we need to shift direction away from “Why is the Internet so bad at this?” because it isn’t
Blink. You read Reddit, right? Have you never noticed that every time there’s an outrageous story, everyone on Reddit bands together and does something about it? Dusty the cat? The ReMax debacle? That woman who got her cruise cancelled and the Redditors sent enough to get her a new one? Also, http://www.cracked.com/article_17170_8-awesome-cases-internet-vigilantism.html . This is pretty impressive. If I’d, say, put a big poster up in a school about Dusty the Cat or ReMax, I doubt the students would have been able to mount half as coherent or overwhelming a response as the Internet did.
And Anonymous versus Scientology was pretty impressive too.
All of these have some things in common. They’re responses to a single outrageous incident, they’re things that the mainstream media doesn’t cover, and they don’t take a huge time commitment to solve. So there is a big difference between them and, say, fighting world hunger.
But what I gather from these examples is that anonymity and the bystander effect do not suddenly change the incentive structure for people online. Possibly the best known Internet action-taking campaign ever was the anti-Scientology one perpetrated by...Anonymous.
I would suggest we shift our inquiries in the direction of why the Internet is so good at Dusty the Cat style operations and so bad at end world hunger style operations. I think it probably has to do with the way people use the Internet itself: short attention spans and novelty-seeking.
On the other hand, the Internet can pull through for people long-term: witness Howard Dean, Barack Obama, Ron Paul, and “netroots”. So maybe it has more to do with the fragmented nature of the Internet. Reddit is a natural place for Ron Paul fans to get together and organize Ron Paul related things, but there are lots of fragmented communities and none of them is specifically focused on world hunger. Nor would a sudden interest in solving world hunger on one community’s part spread to another.
I don’t know. Don’t have a specific answer. Just think we need to shift direction away from “Why is the Internet so bad at this?” because it isn’t