Citizen Paine | Citizen Journalism

Peoria blogger aims to shame

An anoymous blog has its sights set on those people who bring shame to Peoria, Illinois. The Shame on Peoria site launched over the weekend and appears to be affiliated with a second site, Peoria Crack House.

Describing its purpose, Shame on Peoria says:

Peoria and Pekin Illinois recently determined to go after property owners with blighted property, in "shaming" campaigns. Turnabout being fair play some citizens felt the Politicians and Bureaucrats also needed some shaming for their blight on the body politic.

And on Peoria Crack House:

Dedicated to the Buyers and Sellers of Crack Cocaine, who we hope to remove from our community.

As with the Dog Poop Girl incident, here's another example of the public using the internet as a tool for exposing perceived wrongs. Whether this exposure corrects bad behavior, I'm not sure. If it does, it probably will occur indirectly. Someone running a crack house may not shut down just because a blog has mentioned it. But the blog could spur police to act.

Link props: Peoria Pundit and PollyPeoria

Surveillance vs. citizen cameras: checks and balances

Writing about the proliferation of camera phones and security cameras, Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby, in Looking Back at Big Brother, says the technology may not be making us much safer but it is creating new forms of checks and balances:

In the future, when a government accuses someone of wrongdoing on the basis of footage from surveillance cameras, that government better get it right. Chances are the same incident will have been captured by private citizens on camera phones, whose manufacturers expect to sell 186 million units this year.

The proliferation of electronic eyes is probably inevitable, but that's no reason to despair. Governments will watch citizens, but citizens will watch back. More likely than not, the balance of power will shift in favor of the citizens, the inverse of Orwell's prophecy.

Link props: The Open Society Paradox

'Dog Poop Girl' story hits the fan

The "Dog Poop Girl" story, the talk of blogs for several weeks as an example of how citizen journalists and the internet are changing the rules on privacy, hit the Washington Post on Thursday with a piece titled "Subway Fracas Escalates Into Test Of the Internet's Power to Shame."

This article -- about the girl on the South Korea subway whose photo was plastered online after she refused to clean up after her pooch -- says:

In discussions with dozens of people about this story, and in reading comments on blogs, I found an intriguing common thread. The instinct of most was to accept using the Internet as a new social-enforcement tool, but to search for that point on the continuum where enough was too much.

Putting Dog Poop Girl's picture on the Web was OK, some said, but not the clamoring for more information that followed. Others said the woman's face and other identifying features should have been obscured more. Still others said she was entitled to no privacy at all.

Columbia Journalism Review also joined in with "The Tale of Dog Poop Girl Is Not So Funny After All."

Trying to redefine privacy in a transparent society

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.

'Reporters are everywhere'

If we turn into a society where, as Earl Mardle says at A Networked World, 80 percent of the population has a blog, will we wind up with a Big Brother culture where we can't pick our nose in our car for fear of being humiliated on someone's weblog? Or will the positive aspects of a more transparent society outweigh the Big Brother negatives?

As the privacy backlash grows -- as it surely will in a society where those who don't have blogs still will have camera phones and friends with blogs -- what sort of new standards of law or etiquette will arise?

Lots of questions. Not many answers yet.

A thought drawn on my own experience living in a town, Benicia, Calif., where GetLocalNews.com, my employer, has operated a community news web site for five years:

My knowledge that BeniciaNews.com enables anyone to post comments (which has been possible almost since our launch) or articles (for more than two years) has affected my behavior at least in small ways.

Having seen comments on the message board about people's driving habits, I am more cautious when I'm behind the wheel. The possibility of being ticketed, getting in an accident or injuring myself or others already were deterrents to speeding or rolling through the new stop signs that seem sprout weekly. Living in Benicia, the possibility that someone might rate my driving in a message board is yet one more reason to drive carefully. At least til I get out of town, where citizen journalists are few and far between (for now). Just kidding. Really, officer.

Mardle's post ties together Judith Miller, shield laws, the Downing Street Memo and the future of citizen media:

I've been watching the growth of Citizen Media for a year now and it seems to me that it is just hitting its straps and if it keeps up this way, there will be no great need to protect journalists because, when 80% of the population has a blog as a matter of course, and just naturally wants to talk about things they do and see and, dammit, gets the idea that they can ask questions and publish the answers, that bright line between "the public" and "the professional" will fade quickly away.

When every miscreant and/or politician realises that "reporters" are everywhere, listening to, recording, and distributing everything they say, and taking photos of it as well, their ability to corner, embargo, tie down, leak and generally manipulate the media will go away fast. Read the rest