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| Path: Main Street > Resources/Library > Research Articles > Feature Article |
Righteous indignation in the blogosphere: Anger spreads like wildfire on the Internet
By Gillian Kerr, RealWorld Systems
The information in this article is current as of February 21, 2006.A few months ago I was browsing through my blog newsfeeds, avoiding work. It was about midnight. I saw that one of my favourite blogs (Bruce Schneir on Security) had posted an article titled ' Sony secretly installs rootkit on computers', announcing that a few hours before, Mark Russinovich had posted an analysis on his blog about finding a hidden program that had been installed into the operating system of his computer, without his knowledge, by a Sony music CD he'd recently bought. He located this hidden program accidentally while he was testing one of his own programs, a 'rootkit detection utility'. Removing this secret program shut down his ability to play any CDs.
I was surprised to discover that I felt absolutely outraged. In fact, I immediately wrote an e-mail to the offending software developer asking if this was true. Then I went straight to Slashdot, which was already buzzing about this terrible situation (remember, this is the day after it was first posted). There were hundreds of furious postings on Slashdot. In the next few days the story exploded across the blogosphere, and within a couple of weeks it was in the New York Times and (as far as I recall) hundreds of other newspapers. You could see the outrage spreading across the world like a wildfire. Some analysts said that it threatened the survival of Sony itself, though it was just a small piece of software commissioned from a UK software company. And the issue continues to burn in blogs and the regular public media.
What interested me was the personal outrage I felt.
I'm used to seeing 'flame wars' on discussion groups, which are dominated by young men with shorter tempers than the middle-aged professionals I hang out with. But this visceral emotional reaction to a news story is rare for me. And judging by the speed and intensity of the reaction to the rootkit story, I wasn't the only one who was caught up in righteous indignation about threats to the integrity of my precious computer.
I recently read another story in the blog newsfeeds, about a woman who had lost her expensive camera in Hawaii. She got a call from the park ranger saying the camera had been found by a Canadian family, and gave her their number. When she called them, she found that the family had decided to keep the camera because they had a diabetic son and he didn't want to give it back. When I read this, I was furious at Canadians - and I'm Canadian!! Like the rootkit story, this had been picked up from a personal blog and spread to dozens or possibly (by now) hundreds of others. There were dozens of postings counselling revenge against this criminal Canadian family, including posting their names and addresses so that their neighbours could hound them.
This is fascinating, and disturbing.
There seems to be something about blogs that make readers feel a personal connection with posted . Typically, people monitor a group of favourite blogs through RSS news feeds, and those blogs report the most interesting news from blogs that they link to. It creates an incredibly fast way to pass on relevant news, like the old-fashioned 'phone trees' in rural communities. And it is associated with the emotional bang you get with gossip in your own social circle.
So far, this unpredictable explosion of righteous indignation is restricted to the people who read blogs, mostly people who care about computers and cameras. This will change fast. The outrage that you feel when a friend is treated unfairly is often associated with revenge fantasies on his/her behalf, most of which are not carried out. Most of the time, unfairness affects small groups of people, and doesn't spread. For example, someone who used to work at a politician's office told me that most of the complaints raised by constituents concerned 'the Fluffy problem'. Elderly people who sold their houses and moved into condos were smuggling their pets into 'no pets allowed' condos. Other residents were reporting on them, and condo managers were telling them to get rid of their little Fluffies. This was a big problem for the politician's staff, who spent much time on the phone with condo managers, but none of the owners ever got together. Just wait. Soon, everyone with a grudge will be hooking up with everyone else with the same grudge.
There will be two effects. One will be positive, and support a democratic society by providing a way for citizens to identify common problems and advocate together. Steve Mann calls this sousveillance - watching powerful institutions from below, enabling citizens to use monitoring technologies and share information with each other.
Here's a quote from Mann, who suggests that readers explore sousveillance through "the following simple experiment:
- enter the regime;
- ask them why they have surveillance cameras there;
- accept a typical response such as "Why are you so paranoid? Only criminals and terrorists are afraid of cameras!";
- photograph the respondent;
- observe reaction."
The second effect will be socially disruptive, leading to massive emotional reactions that spread like a chain reaction through overlapping social networks linked by credible blogs (or whatever blog-equivalents are called in the next few years). As social software like blogs spread through the global population, we will see some nasty conflicts that go far beyond indignation about messed-up electronics.
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Gillian Kerr, Ph.D., C.Psych.
President, RealWorld Systems
gkerr at realworldsystems.net
Read my weblog at http://blog.realworldsystems.net
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