A followup on "Reporters Are Everywhere": Check out this fascinating commentary at Balkinization titled Of Privacy and Poop: Norm Enforcement Via the Blogosphere.
Writer Daniel Solove looks at the case of a Korean woman who has been humiliated on the internet after someone captured her photo on a subway train when her dog did what dogs do and she refused to clean it up. (Balkinization cites Boing Boing, which got the story from Don Park's Daily Habit.)
Solove writes:
The dog-shit-girl case involves a norm that most people would seemingly agree to – clean up after your dog. Who could argue with that one? But what about when norm enforcement becomes too extreme? Most norm enforcement involves angry scowls or just telling a person off. But having a permanent record of one’s norm violations is upping the sanction to a whole new level. The blogosphere can be a very powerful norm-enforcing tool, allowing bloggers to act as a cyber-posse, tracking down norm violators and branding them with digital scarlet letters.
He suggests that new laws will be part of the answer, but acknowledges that legal efforts face roadblocks:
I believe that, as complicated as it might be, the law must play a role here. The stakes are too important. While entering law into the picture could indeed stifle freedom of discussion on the Internet, allowing excessive norm enforcement can be stifling to freedom as well. ... Could the law provide redress? This is a complicated question; certainly under existing doctrine, making a case would have many hurdles. And some will point to practical problems. Bloggers often don’t have deep pockets. But perhaps the possibility of lawsuits might help shape the norms of the Internet. In the end, I strongly doubt that the law alone can address this problem; but its greatest contribution might be to help along the development of blogging norms that will hopefully prevent more cases such as this one from having crappy endings.
More alarms sounded at Desert of the Mind in a post titled "1984 = S. Korea":
So you have to watch every move you make, because everybody's watching.
And that, of course, discourages anyone from standing out, taking a
chance, being different in any sort of way. It's a lot safer to conform
to the group consensus, to follow the groupthink, to be in the thick of
the mob. Because they'll be watching, what you say, and what you do,
and what you think. CONFORM OR DIE!
What's really gotten everyone stirred up is the mob mentality that led people not only to out the young woman with photos online but then to try to identify her and her relatives. So, the problem isn't necessarily that the girl was humiliated -- reasonable people could disagree on whether she deserved to have her photo posted online -- but that some people wanted more.
UPDATE: Over at A Networked World, Earl Mardle responding in part to my previous post, counters some of the panic over the loss of privacy. He says the quantity of material on the internet will bury the more mundane invasions of our privacy, and he points out that the loss of privacy cuts both ways, meaning that the mobs will get away with their misdeeds less often:
... we will tend to be protected by the very long tail of the Internet Power Law. Our nose-picking may be blogged, but it will probably get buried amongst the much more interesting activities of Janet Jackson, Camilo Mejia, Dave Chappelle, Michael Jackson and Brad Pitt.
While picking our noses may be less than enthralling, with so many cameras taking millions of pictures every day, practically everything is being recorded. Which is making it harder and harder for those prepared to take the law into their own hands.
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