The thing that's really bad about stuff like this is that it never ends- once it's out there on the internet, it's there forever. Nobody knows the whole story except those involved, and for all we know, that woman had nothing to do with the whole thing. But good luck to her to clear her name. I think stuff like that can go on in mild ways in internet forums- someone will say something, and someone else says, but you said differently 6 months ago, 1 year ago! I almost feel there should be a button to press that will completely delete the internet every 3-5 years, and we can all start fresh. I challenge Google to get right on that, lol.

This whole thing is just horrible and sad. It's also part of the reason why I always use my real name on the Intertrons-- I like having the constant reminder that everything I do online is being logged, indexed, and can be used against me at any time.

I think the particular stories cited bred so obscenely on the internet because the base conflict in each is an affront to internet culture/community. The larger a community the more difficult it is to control and the more likely it is to fight instead of flee when 'threatened'. And so it goes...

I don't believe that a lack of anonymity would have changed the retaliation, or really that the internet is anything particularly unique.

"...or really that the internet is anything particularly unique."

See, I dunno about that. Maybe it's just me, but there's a special breed of grandstand-y, look-at-me-ism, I AM INTERNERD FEEL MY WRATH kind of animosity behind this (and most other internet clashes) that goes way beyond even the most pathological meatspace argument and/or bullying. And the thing is, it's really not just the intensity or the magnitude of this particular case, it's the sheer prevalance of that ongoing low-level snarkfest cut-and-jab, I'm wittier-than-thou one-upmanship fiesta that you find in and around many online communities. Now, I enjoy snark and witty repartee, and I have made my share of fuckups, so I absolutely get how, in the heat of argument, one can emotionally buy in or snap and say/type something in a rage that one totally regrets later.

And to TPS's very good point, once you've done that, it can and will come back to haunt you forever, whether it's your online angst and cutting journals as a Myspace teen that get dredged up in a later political campaign, or that drunken ill-advised admission of "god I'd like to [insert flame here] that [creative expletive]" that you may someday get used against you by HR, or god help you, a prosecuting attorney, even if you never carried out that threat.

Another example of this is Mychal Bell of the Jena 6. If internet interlopers had not interfered, he could have been out on probation right now playing college football. (Yeah, yeah, attempted murder charges and all that, but those were dropped long before the march ever occurred. If the DA was looking to ruin this kid's life, why did he and the judge give him four straight juvenile probations?)

However now instead of a sealed juvenile record and a chance of using his status as a first time adult offender, Bell is facing a fifth juvenile felony and he is sitting in jail now because that battery charge was reduced from adult to juvenile. Plus, the media just won a lawsuit to open all his previous juvenile court transcripts. This kid's privacy has been obliterated and any chance of redeeming his reputation is gone.

In trying to help this kid, his supporters have effectively destroyed his life.

*posts lfr's name, quest and favorite color on his blog*

I don't know... everything I've read about this points to this woman being a near-sociopath...
Making a fake myspace to manipulate a child, calling the cops over a foosball table knowing it was in retaliation for pushing a disturbed teen over the edge to suicide, shit, in one case she went to the parents to ask them to stop talking to the media (even though the parents never said her name!) because it made her feel bad.

Within days of the story breaking there was a blog posted about the "truth" about this poor dead girl, basically dragging her name through the mud, and someone apparently matched THAT to the Drew family, too, through the domain registration of their business site!

I find it very hard to be sympathetic. I hope that she does have to move away, change her name, and start a new life. That's better than the Meiers family can ever have again, thanks to her.

"I find it very hard to be sympathetic"

that's not the point. I'm not sympathetic. I'm horrified tho at the lengths the WHOLE THING, from start to finish, has gone to.

that's all. I'm not defending anything/one.

... and tho it's apparent that (yet again) I wasn't clear about my topic, here's the actual gist, if I can articulate it:

Is it just my imagination, or has the medium of the internet made this sort of public bullying / lynching / retaliation theme easier and somehow more acceptable than it would be if these confrontations had to be carried out face-to-face?

I guess it was a bad topic to bring up as a discussion point, as apparently very few people want to further discuss it (yes, I'm aware there was already a thread about this story), and it's a controversial subject that's highly emotionally charged.

I'm not making any judgement calls on the actual event(s) that went on in the particular case. To me, there seems to be more than a little manipulation of public opinion going on, from ALL sides, the media not the least.

The article itself, granted on the surface it's about the "Myspace suicide", seems to have a deeper subtext (i.e. to me title of the article suggests: "Cyberbulling Suicide stokes the Internet Fury Machine").

So, what is this "Internet Fury Machine"? What are your thoughts on this phenomenon, assuming this isn't just grandstanding hyperbole on the part of the Wired staff?

that's really all I was asking.

There is definitely internet fury. We see this every day. Part of it is tribal (Fark vs.'X'; SA vs. 'X', etc.) and the mob factor, part of it is youth and immaturity, and the vast majority of it is anonymity plus convenience.

People can sit in their cozy homes and just type words onto the glowy screen behind an alias and be very aggressive/self-righteous/boastful/outrageous at no cost at all... usually. There isn't a special kind of "internet" anger or bloodlust - it's the standard, garden-variety dark side of humanity that has always existed, and the "machine" is simply the internet itself, which happens to be perfectly suited as a medium for lazy monsters.

right on taz, I'm also wondering if the sheer convenience / speed / ease of the medium isn't just amplifying this dark side.

Not that this sort of navel-gazing hasn't been done since the days of 300 baud modems and dialup onto bbs/compuserve, mind you. Been there, talked about it then.

it's just that these days the internet / connectivity has penetrated to a pretty wide / far percentage of the (at least developed?) world, and it's (perhaps?) becoming more widely accepted as a social norm... if that's the right way to look at it.

I mean there's the difference between engaging your social politeness cues / filters when interacting face-to-face, and how you react to stuff online. Some of us (not all) do tend to be a little more detached when dealing with text on a screen; whether we're more calmly rational, flip, erudite, cocky, or whatever. I say this because I have recently interacted with a few college students who don't seem to make any distinction at all; they find nothing wrong with presenting themselves like they do to their Halo gamer friends, or on some usenet board or on Myspace. Is this just modern society and me waving my cane at the kids on my goddamn lawn, or has the internet detachment sort of attitude started to bleed over into real life? I mean part of me says this is just teenagers / young adults being annoying teenagers / young adults, and part of me thinks it's not a great social coping strategy, but whatever.

I mean, where does the line get drawn / start to blur, I guess?

blargh, I'm not trying to paint the internet as some Great Evil. And I'm not even making much sense to myself. I guess I'll just go to bed instead.

sweet dreams bunnies!

"... So, what is this "Internet Fury Machine"? What are your thoughts on this phenomenon, assuming this isn't just grandstanding hyperbole on the part of the Wired staff? ..."

At the risk of sounding like one of those hoary throwbacks that first got online with a Bell 103 (when actually my first modem was an off-brand acoustic coupler set I bought around 1977), I'll say I've seen various forms of electronic-to-real-world misbehavior since the halcyon days of VAX/VMS based commercial BBSs (bulletin board systems) in Boston, around 1979. In those days, telephone toll charges generally limited BBS operators to local folks - it was just prohibitively expensive for individuals to call long distance, and maintain slow 300-1200 baud connections, for BBS operations to be really practical "national" level entities. Forget "international" scope, entirely. Nobody but governments could afford those comm charges. It wasn't until after telecomm deregulation in the mid-80s, and the subsequent long distance price wars, that operations like The WELL really got a national user base.

So, people on the old boards would frequently get to know one another IRL, and not always in a good way. If you knew that some dork who had trashed your uploads on a given board very probably lived in a certain telephone exchange, it made the prospect of going out and finding him IRL pretty appetizing. So, it was generally a feature of BBS "kulture" by the mid-80s that you took some measures to obfuscate your online identities, especially if you liked to screw with other people's heads. And the old boards were often trivial to hack; I must have had privilege escalation on 30+ Boston boards at one point, without much real effort on my part. As long as you weren't a psychopath, and didn't take your games out on the street, nobody really minded. Hacking other user accounts on the embryonic Mac-only America Online was just good clean fun, unless you tracked someone down and beat the hell out of 'em.

But when I moved to Atlanta in '87, it was the Wild West. Atlanta had the largest physical LATA in the world. Border to border, the Atlanta LATA ran from eastern Alabama nearly to South Carolina, and from Chattanooga in the north, to below Macon. Over 9 million people in one LATA, and a physical area that really made IRL dust ups of the Boston type impractical. So, for a short time in the late 80s, people on the Atlanta boards were merciless to each other - there were basically no ramifications to being a complete dick online. The first good PC based BBS packages (like WildCat) came out, PC hardware became affordable, anyone could get a couple of extra phone lines and modems in his bedroom, and boom, they were sysops! And that's part of what made Atlanta a hot bed for phreakers, the other part being guys like Dennis Hayes, Hayes Micro, and the whole BellSouth community. Because IRL payback, in a LATA as large as Atlanta, meant getting phone records. Time was, in Atlanta, a 48 hour dump on 10 numbers could be had, if you knew someone, for $100. BellSouth guys were actually taking their own printers to work, to attach to their ops terminals, so that all the LUN dump printing they were doing didn't hit BellSouth printers, and run up BellSouth paper costs. Up until 1990 or so, if you wanted to "get" someone in ATL, you just had to have a bit of patience and a few bucks to throw at some BellSouth folks, but it was enough of a barrier that the average Joe didn't generally get involved. By the early '90s, however, it was common enough for people to take online disagreements into Waffle House parking lots at 2:00 a.m., that many Atlanta area police departments started "cyber crime" squads. These weren't people looking for kiddie porn, though. They were people who were called in over warm dead bodies, when there was any suggestion that the deceased may have been gunned down as a result of something said online; these "cyber cops" went to people's houses, busted down real doors, and confiscated a lot of PC's, to use as evidence in assault and murder cases.

The scary part of the story lfr originally linked is that the Internet now makes such stories both essentially global, and also makes it possible for every crackpot with some time on their hands a potential vigilante. You can piss off people all over the planet, for doing not very much that should be truly offensive these days. And your payback is liable to be a local bunch of folks showing up on your doorstep to right the wrongs they've heard about through some e-mail chain, to their Blackberry.

Despite recent improvements in phone records protections, this story shows that Joe Average is increasingly effective as a vigilante. So, keep a Mossberg in the front hall closet, another near the back door, and don't leave home with your cell phone (it can be easily used to physically find you in many jurisdictions), or without your CCW, kids. Shoot low, they're ridin' ponies!

Well, you know, people suck. The Internet lets them suck harder, faster and without anyone knowing who they are, so they get the same sort of courage that mobs get when they start to spiral out of control and for the same reason - anonymity (assumed or otherwise).

At the start, though, is people, not the technology. The technology just enables people to fulfil their dirty little desires, that's all. It's pretty much the same as the gun debate - if people want to hurt others, they will - give them a gun, though and they can hurt people long-distance, much more effectively and, most importantly, with a degree of anonymity in their own minds. When you don't have to do anything more than pull a trigger, you aren't as personally involved in the violence. When all you have to do is type words into the magic machine, you aren't personally involved in the violence either. After all, there aren't real people at the end of all those tubes, just computers ...

Thanks for that Paulsc, if I could favorite a comment I would!

True, Wilder - an interesting story and some history thrown in for good measure.

wow, paulsc!


Wow...

yea for certain that's one comment that deserves its own sidebar or something; I mean there should be some recognition as like "best of MeCha" or something like that... not just relegation to the bottom of an obscure post that will scroll off the front page in a couple days.

This also brings up a feature I wish MeCha had; some way to tag or mark comments so that I could refer back to them easily. I just know I'm going to want to reference this discussion sometime a week/month/year/??? down the road.

"...the Internet now makes such stories both essentially global, and also makes it possible for every crackpot with some time on their hands a potential vigilante..."

exactly. not only was your post very articulate and informative, that's pretty much what I was getting at.

The other side of this is that I also get the feeling the angst and kneejerkery has started bleeding over into daily realspace social interplay.

/farted around on the VAX while dad was doing graduate studies.