Dog Poop Girl and the New Big Brother

A cautionary tale for those who want to go for a walk

Right now, blogs in South Africa are – for the most part – being enthusiastically embraced as a major area of online expansion. Bridget McNulty blogged recently about ‘The Role of the blogger’. So what is the role of the blogger? What can we expect blogs to be saying? One thing no one expects is the capacity of the internet to shame.

Let me start by telling you the story of Dog Poop Girl.

Once upon a time an attractive Korean girl was taking the subway with her little mutt when the critter pooped on the carriage floor. People around her asked her to clean it up; she refused. The people around her became agitated. The girl responded – apparently – with hostility. An old man offered a few napkins…the girl used it to wipe the dog’s rear end, but the poop remained, and from the pictures, it looks like some poor old geezer eventually committed to the messy mopping up operation.

It could all have ended there, with a nasty smell trailing a disappearing train, but the Koreans were going to have none of that. A girl on the subway train, using her hand phone, took pictures of the girl and her dog, and posted it on a popular Korean website.

The South Korea people went berserk. Thousands of people got involved, hollering on forums, yapping on blogs. But that wasn’t the end of it. After only a few days, a call to arms went out, and bloggers rallied to unearth details of her past. These requests for information were so ubiquitous; people began to recognize her by her dog (since her face is obscured to some extent by her long dark hair).

Nothing was too insignificant for the bloggers to seize upon. Every smidgeon that could be found on this young woman was analyzed; to the extent that her activities became national news in Korea, and the Washington Post reported that [Dog Poop Girl was being] ‘discussed in Sunday sermons in Korean churches in the Washington area.’

Facing continuous public shame, the girl then dropped out of university and disappeared.

So to return to the question – what is the role of the blogger or so-called citizen journalist? I am certainly one of the many bloggers who criticise the mainstream media for the news they avoid, or the facts that are either maligned or glossed over entirely. My favourite subject has for some time been the collective sleepwalking approach to energy prices, and my fixation with this oversight developed long before oil prices reached the present levels. Some bloggers go further to parody the news, and interestingly enough, a TV parody, Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, was recently voted best news show. So in a sense, the role of the blog to some extent asks or at least challenges the response to another question: what is news?

On a recent episode of 3^rd degree a cell phone video of a Free State girl beating a horse resulted in a hearing attended by – it seemed – most of the dorp. It’s quite thinkable to assume Horse Whip Girl could share the same fate as Dog Poop Girl. Personally I feel that Horse Whip Girl deserves to be shamed.

But is it fair to allow an internet mob to converge against an individual? Because it certainly starts with a norm that everyone can agree has been crossed, but then escalates towards a point where a lot of people then stampede over boundaries of common decency – such as someone’s right to personal privacy: Information on where they live, who their friends are, and other private and sensitive information.

"But having a permanent record of one's norm violations is upping the sanction to a whole new level . . .” says Daniel J. Solove, a George Washington University law professor. Do bloggers have the right to brand a target for life? Because once something is posted on the internet, it is pretty much carved in stone. Even removing information from source does not guarantee that all traces have not been copied and pasted on other sites.

So is a privacy violation on the net no big deal?

Well, I have been the victim of a privacy violation. This happened on a cycling forum called The Hub. I was trying to address a problem I was having with Cycling South Africa’s refusal to grant me a license in the forum when a handful of avatars began posting my cycling results, and ransacking my blog for dirt, quickly posting my profile picture, and then chortling with delight over a particular picture. It was fun (for them) for a while, until I accused the moderators of failing to adhere to their own rules (personal slander was not allowed), and subsequently I was summarily booted off the site. It is a big deal and you’re likely to loose a lot of sleep if it happens to you.

I have also used my own blog to address ‘norm’ violations I’ve experienced in my private life. Some are anonymous rants against ‘bad drivers’. While I rarely take aim in a speculative fashion, I once targeted a particular individual who allowed me to use her studio for a photographic exhibition, but then sabotaged my exhibition, withholding footage of the exhibition and being generally and mysteriously un-cooperative. If you know someone who is a blogger, and in particular a blogger who walks around with a camera everywhere he/she goes, tread a little more carefully than you otherwise would.

This may seem a crazy suggestion, except that everywhere people are walking around with recording devices. Any conversation can be recorded by simply setting a cell phone to ‘record player’. A man who studies the impact of technology on group behaviour, Howard Rheingold, says the rules of privacy have changed.

"The shadow side of the empowerment that comes with a billion and a half people being online is the surveillance aspect. We used to worry about big brother -- the state -- but now of course it's our neighbours, or people on the subway."

Look left. Look right. Big Blogger is watching you.

More reading on this fascinating topic:
Besmirching ourselves online
Subway Fracas Escalates Into Test Of the Internet's Power to Shame
Real-Name System Sought for Internet Users