Flock, flag, Disorient · posted by vaibhav bhawsar Feb 26, 01:35
It is interesting to see how individuals within communities like youTube and Digg are congregating to flag content generated/posted by the rest of the users which they think is inappropriate. For example there is a group on youTube that is flagging videos that they consider as hate speech against Islam.
Maybe some of the institutions that have been accused of surveillance and censoring their citizens don’t have to worry, cause now there is the intelligence of the mob or swarm, of people online who do the same work for them for free and pretty efficiently. But now its not about blatantly blocking content but creating enough consensus around an issue that either informs you or disorients you. So in the end you don’t really know what to take away from such places. Or worse, your notions of things remain the same. So you never really learn to tolerate far away people, culture, religion and points of view etc.
I wonder if the internet is ever going to be a place to grow sensitive as a human being…or if it will ever make us all that much more tolerant of different backgrounds and cultures? Or it will further segregate some of us by lending itself to ideas of citizen(netizen) surveillance and morale policing by the netizens themselves.
See some news here for how mobs of netizens are probably turning comment boxes into toilet paper rolls!
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It really is becoming a world or rather parallel society with it own rules, police, laws, crimes, behavior, culture…
BTW, did you come across the flak google is facing for making money off of others’ content through it’s adwords and adsense, etc. Seems like there a MSFT-led anti-google brigade gaining strength!
— shuchi · Mar 7, 09:48 · #