The Internet Rage Firehose

[usernamenumber]

I've been watching this debacle unfold practically in real-time. The Internet Rage Firehose is scary and fascinating.

Short version:

1. 9yo girl in Scottland starts a blog where she photos and reviews her school lunches
2. Blog grows, kids around the world start sending pics of their lunches (inducing several fits of "in <i>my day</i> we were lucky to get food that looked as good as that!!" in me)
3. Local newspaper writes an extremely critical article about the school lunch program, citing the blog
4. Local council has girl pulled out of class and told that she's no longer allowed to take photos of her lunches
5. The Internet hears about it, rage ensues.
6. Council posts a statement defending its actions, saying the 9 year old wasn't portraying them fairly, and that they did it for the sake of its cafeteria employees, who feared for their jobs. No, it didn't make any sense to me either.
7. Rage continues.
8. Council replaces previous statement with one from the head of the council that basically takes it all back, "advises" that the school lift the photo ban, announces an upcoming "school lunch summit" to talk about it, and acknowledges that the council's issue is with the paper and not the little girl. 

I actually took the time to write the council after that, on the assumption that more people were willing to spend time writing in to excoriate decisions of which they did not approve than to commend steps in the right direction, but a provocative counterpoint was also put forward by Popehat, a nifty-looking legal blog about speech issues that I found while researching The Oatmeal Incident:

"""
The original statement is the honest expression of the attitude of the people who work for the Council, and for government everywhere, issued before a higher-up stepped in and judged that power must yield to prudence in this instance. The Council's initial statement demonstrates a sick entitlement by government to be free of criticism, a belief that they may impose their concept of "fairness" upon citizen speech, a sense that government actors ought to be protected from the uninformed opinions of the great unwashed, lest their fee-fees be hurt and good order disrupted. That, again, is the lesson here. These people are not your friends. But there's a more hopeful lesson as well: by publicizing government misbehavior, we can occasionally shame them into respecting the rights of citizens.
"""

I'm not *quite* cynical enough to echo PopeHat's take on the council's statement as a universal principle, but I know it's probably true more often than not. 

And yet, there's a flipside to this. The growing trend of fighting unaccountable centralized power with even less accountable distributed power has implications that bother me a lot (though on the flip-flipside, probably not as much as the implications of a situation in which the latter couldn't exist).

Two of the most prominently accepted statements about The Internet seem to be:

• LOL, the Internet is full of one-sided opinions and misinformation, and...
• LOL, you pissed off the Internet, now we're comin' for you!!1

How do you reason with The Interenet? And what about when The Internet is wrong? Feel free to substitute your horizontal collective of choice for "The Internet" in the preceding. 

The more I think about this, the more it kinda freaks me out. And I've been thinking about it a lot lately.

Comments

[real-green-tea.livejournal.com]

OK my first thought is, why are nine year olds on the internet. Any issues regarding whether it is prudent to let youngsters float around on the internet aside...

I dunno, I guess I've come around from the POV of "government should be allowed to have complete control of the internet, people say a lot of harmful/stupid stuff! protect the people from themselves" to "oh hey, people actually have stuff to say that is of value, and also, no government anywhere really knows how to control flow of information without, well, basically abusing that power, so, might as well let people say wtf they want; sure there'll be a lot of tripe but also maybe some good or even really important things will emerge." I guess alot of that thinking is due to thoughts about sj and related observations thru that lens over time.

Do I think some grand truth is going to emerge from letting people say random stuff on teh interwebs? Absolutely not. The last word'll still, more often than not, go to the biggest, the loudest, the strongest, and/or the most powerful. Statements like "the truth will prevail" are just about as true as "love conquers all" and "through faith all things are possible."

There's no reasoning with the internet. There's no right or wrong answers out there, what people say just 'is.' We can only hope that sometimes important truths emerge from giving people more opportunities to express themselves? Though if you think about who's on the internet, there's still a lot of people who don't have access to this forum (lack of computer or network connection, inadequate reading/writing skills, inadequate time to contribute b/c doing other things to get by, lack of interest due to disenfranchisement, etc etc)

Ed. Relatedly, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303410404577468170016159682.html (Forced abortion issues in China given more attention due to pictures posted on the Inernet)

[dot_fennel]

Did the Council undergo something worse than just a lot of phone calls and emails? The PopeHat post doesn't make this sound particularly rageful. But from your summary, it sounds like something more serious went on.

(I know what you mean about some people shrugging off the internet's more vicious excesses, so I can imagine that PopeHat is leaving something out. I just couldn't figure out what, from clicking around a little.)

[shinyquill.livejournal.com]

Yes, the Internet attacks and harasses those it doesn't like. There's been a LOT of talk and a lot of analysis on the ways that gets directed particularly badly - perhaps most recently the re: the Feminist Frequency kickstarter. Sometimes the Internet is wrong. Sometimes figuring out how to engage with - or reason with - parts of the Internet is hard. What do you think would make it better? (Hint: "tell the sjws to stfu" will send me to the metaphorical unfollow button, because I am completely uninterested in listening to people who don't want to listen to me (or other people who care about making the world a better place), and I am even less interested in hearing from people who routinely misrepresent the arguments of their opponents.)

Quite frankly, I have NO sympathy whatsoever for this council unless they've received threats from people. Disapproving speech is not unethical speech, even if I'm calling someone a douchebag. Even large quantities of disapproving speech - even if hundreds or thousands of people are ringing your phone off the hook to tell you how vile your group is and how much they loathe its decisions - are not unethical speech.

I don't think I could say anything but epithets to people like this [redacted], which is why had I heard about it earlier I wouldn't have written in. They're super gross, the WHOLE WORLD should know how gross they are and how little respect they have for their students, and if that harms the school then maybe that example will discourage other schools from treating kids like excrement. I'm really glad the council backpedaled.

Re: the 9-year-old - I was on the web at that age, though not sharing much. My younger sister was on the web at that age. Kids should be discouraged from releasing information that endangers them (and told what that information is and is not), but saying minors should be discouraged from writing or communicating on the web is saying people with fewer legal rights than almost anybody else don't deserve to speak about their experiences, which is nonsense and also super gross. The dismissive, your-age-makes-you-only-half-a-person way we treat legal minors in general really freaks me out.

The Internet was my real educator and my older siblings (I was an eldest child), the Internet is sometimes a monstrosity, and I love the Internet. I trust the Internet a lot more than I trust any cop (Sam Vimes et al. are the exceptions proving the rule, and also fictional), I trust the Internet more than most "educators" or parents (certainly the Internet undid a lot of damage done by my actual parents), and were I going to write a Father's Day letter it'd probably be *to* the Internet. The Internet doesn't freak me out much at all.