The latest in a series of nasty little revelations that perhaps there are people (nefarious characters, I tell you!) lurking online whose general ethical demeanor is not exactly that of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, is the kerfuffle over the story ratings over at Digg.
Apparently a cabal of devoted/dedicated/obsessive users were coordinating their efforts to ensure that stories, items and stuff they like wound up atop the Digg pile.
Why Digg fraud, Google bombing, Wikipedia vandalism will not be stopped by ZDNet‘s Donna Bogatin — The leaders of each of the flawed systems–Digg, Google, Wikipedia–publicly evangelize a revolutionary worthiness of their endeavors to rationalize away claims of abuse, entrenchment, spam, falsehoods, libel, infringement…
CUT:
While Google’s Schmidt may be satisfied with less than perfect
answers, the inherent dangers of open, flawed Web-based systems should not be
rationalized away.
Waaal now.
I have some impulses battling it out within me. On the one hand, there is the inner ink-stained wretch of the 4th estate wanting to yell “Welcome to the party, bay-bee!” at the New Media types discovering that the audience by and large, really is not all that well-behaved. Oh yes.
Spend a few years (hell, months or weeks would suffice) dredging through the “Letters to the Editor,” where most of the readable letters start off “Dear Dickwad…” It goes downhill from there. The rest of the letters are scrawled schizo rants on ripped-out looseleaf notebook paper, with the handwriting filling every inch of the page going around and around the outside borders in a spiral that apparently is one of the consistent tip-offs that the writer’s brain is spinning around and around in circles inside his head … much like poor old Vincent’s … but at least he had the excuse that he was eating the Cadmium-laced paint and that was causing his thought processes to become … unsound.
So yeah – let the Digg fakery and Google bombing and Wiki wars take their place next to the LA Times’ failed experiment in Wikitorials last year (the one wherein they got hammered with goatse and quickly yanked it down).
Here’s the rub folks. Much as it involves all the latest whiz-bang technology, the Internet is still a creation of, by and with humanity. We may see it on these antiseptic emotionless beige boxes, but that which we see (with certain exceptions) is something human. Which is what we want. That is why social networking and chat rooms and IM and all that flourish. We want to connect. We want to get laid. We want to brag, argue, pontificate, learn … whatever.
All the things that happen out here in Meatworld are happening/have happened/will happen in this new reality construct. Because we’re the ones doing them.
Unlike in Total Recall, we cannot take “ego trips” where we become someone else – where we as collective humanity become something else. Maybe sometime soon when I will exist in a Seagate 40 Septabyte hard drive alongside all the others … cruising around in the aforementioned motorized drinks trolley cart with little titanium grabber claws … when we’ve evolved in some way to leave behind the R-complex in our heads.
But not yet. We are still who we have always been, and the bright shining future of universal happiness and brotherhood that the Web or Web 2.0 or whatever iteration we come up with next cannot change that. We’re going to figure out loopholes by which to exploit the existing environment to our advantage. That’s what we evolved to do. That’s why we’re the apex predators, sitting atop the food chain.