Even hell hath no fury like an electronic crowd, as Richard Dawkins discovered to his cost last week. Dawkins’s mistake was to update his Web site with a letter politely giving notice of a few planned changes to its “community” bulletin board, where 85,000 enthusiastic atheists come to air their views and discuss them with like minds.
“Dear forum members,” his cheery posting began, and before long the feedback was coming in thick and fast. Dawkins returned to his computer to find himself described as “a suppurating rat’s rectum.” Another anonymous community member expressed a “sudden urge to ram a fistful of nails down your throat,” while a third described the author of The God Delusion as having “a slack-jawed turd-in-the-mouth mug if ever I saw one.”
The reaction must have confirmed Dawkins’s worst suspicions. He was already concerned at the amount of the gossip, abuse and irrelevant discussion that turns up on his site, which was why he was keen to subject it to greater editorial control. Dawkins is no wallflower but, even for someone familiar with the fury of US creationists, the bile he provoked seems to have taken him aback.
“Surely there has to be something wrong with people who can resort to such over-the-top language, overreacting so spectacularly to something so trivial,” he wrote. “Even some of those with more temperate language are responding to the proposed changes in a way that is little short of hysterical.”
There must, he felt, be “something rotten in the Internet culture that can vent it.”
Dawkins’s language is extravagant but he makes an interesting point. When anyone can have their say, what use is the stuff that comes out the other end? What can be done with it, and who’s going to be in charge of quality control when things go wrong?
Three Google executives are considering at least some of those questions. They were convicted last Wednesday and awarded six-month suspended sentences for allowing a clip of an autistic boy being viciously bullied to play on Google Video. Google, the judges claimed, had violated the boy’s privacy, even though the company removed the video as soon as it was brought to its attention.
It raises the question of what to do with the mass of material that is piling up on social media sites such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Google Video.
For the Internet gurus who travel around like fire-breathing evangelists, preaching hate for the old world and an all-consuming love for the new, the answer is clear — the vast ocean of electronic information out there, them say, represents a historic triumph of the audience over the institutions which have kept them at bay.
Many mainstream institutions have taken their advice. There’s no question that the deluge of data can be a great resource, or that social media is a fantastic way of passing nuggets of information around.
Make the mistake of promising vast, anonymous online audiences more profound involvement, however, and the results can be ruinous.
Take an experiment mounted by the publishing company Penguin UK when it invited millions of Web users to collaborate on a “group novel” called A Million Penguins. Over six weeks, beginning on Feb. 1, 2007, a blank Web page was launched with a call for contributions from anonymous online scribes. In keeping with the collaborative spirit of the enterprise, anyone was allowed to add, edit or delete what had gone before.
Such was its ambition that it even borrowed its opening line from Jane Eyre.
“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day,” it began, before beginning its inevitable headlong rush downhill. Characters multiplied out of control, paragraphs and whole sections ended at random points, plot lines drifted hopelessly, and were left hanging.
The story was so chaotic as to be unreadable, and kept splintering off in new directions: at one point it even divided itself into “Novel A” and “Novel B” with links to alternative endings. Some collaborative novelists took it upon themselves to try to sabotage the work, with one taking the trouble to litter the text with references to bananas.
In the end, just like Dawkins, the organizers were forced to lock down the project a few hours a day to ward off the vandals, and to allow the novel time to develop.
Putting a brave face on the alphabet soup that had resulted from all this activity, the editor responsible for the project noted that his book was “not the most read, but certainly the most written novel in history.”
That was putting it mildly. One of the reasons for the novel’s incoherence, it became apparent, was that not even the masses of novelists who had queued up to help write the book had bothered to read what had gone before. They were too busy writing.
Penguin’s failed attempt to persuade an electronic crowd to co-write a novel points to a deeper problem that occurs when an organization is thrown open to electronic feedback.
Often it only works until its beneficiaries realize that, no matter how many messages they fire off, those in authority are bound to retain the ultimate reins of control. At that point it is likely that, like those former fans of Dawkins, they will switch from offering “good” or helpful feedback into pushing “bad” or destructive feedback into the system. The angry, splenetic or downright abusive tone sometimes exhibited is a good example of this. There are many more exciting things we can do with the Internet than simply flatter the audience. In any case, organizations often are not entirely clear about what they hope to achieve by inviting in the electronic crowd. Often they just want to save money.
Some of the most enthusiastic proponents of outsourcing journalism to the electronic crowd have been the same large regional US newspaper groups whose stranglehold on their audiences has been broken by the net, and who have been losing money as a result. Talk among yourselves, they say, like overwhelmed teachers.
Most of the time, it’s no more than a gimmicky attempt to rustle up an audience. In the UK a few days after Christmas, the Conservative party announced plans to apply the “wisdom of online crowds” to solving common problems — how national lottery money should be spent, for example, or how to pick the England squad for the upcoming football World Cup.
Most of the case studies in their accompanying press release had been lifted straight from a 2008 book called Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe, a California-based journalist.
One study that might have inspired the Tories’ imagination was that of a Kent soccer team, Ebbsfleet United.
In January 2008, Ebbsfleet was sold to a consortium of more than 20,000 fans who, grouped together around a Web site called MyFootballClub, were granted the power to pick the team. Given that crowds of football supporters are well known to have deeply felt opinions and imaginative ways of expressing them, professional football was thought to be an ideal way of turning the theory of crowdsourcing into practice. From here on, Ebbsfleet fans were promised, they wouldn’t need to shout insults at the manager after a bad result. From now on they were the manager.
The idea of passing control of a professional football club to an electronic crowd was an audacious one, and Tory strategists would have done well to investigate. What they would have discovered was that the club was deeply in debt and the cash stumped up by MyFootballClub —each of its members had coughed up an annual subscription of £35 (US$53) — had effectively secured its fortunes.
But behind the scenes the club’s manager, former Republic of Ireland player Liam Daish, seemed to be hoping for a quiet life.
“I get the feeling,” he told a reporter, “that a majority of people on MyFootballClub won’t want to pick sides as they won’t feel qualified to do so.”
So what happened? Members of MyFootballClub were granted the right to decide ticket prices and which football kit to buy — they voted, for example, that the contract for producing their football strips should be awarded to Nike.
In theory they also had the right to select the team on a one-member, one-vote basis via the Web site. In practice, it didn’t really work out. When I telephoned the club on Friday, I was told that Daish was still picking the team. The online audience was still the audience, and the majority of them had drifted away disillusioned. Just as Daish had predicted, they weren’t up to the job.
James Harkin is the author of Cyburbia, published in paperback in April.
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