It is only natural that a large percentage of the news stories read and seen each day now are related to the Internet, with almost ubiquitous Web access meaning people can always be online through laptops, desktop computers and mobile devices.
People live their lives online and, if Internet access were taken away, could lose a large part of those lives. However, the convenience has produced arguable results in Taiwan when it comes to social justice.
The power of the Internet multiplies the speed of communication: Information travels and disseminates in a way beyond the imagination of the pre-Internet generation.
The power helps people spread anything they see that is unfair, unjust, strange or simply funny, allowing the public to make the people involved overnight celebrities, for good or bad.
The changes in the infrastructure, the ways people socialize and how information is spread have spawned a phenomenon dubbed “Internet mass hunting,” a practice for modern-day Taiwanese to uphold social justice and collaborate to facilitate changes.
Unorthodox behaviors posted online, for example, the ostentatious display of wealth — in a recent case by displaying tons of cash in a video — or the torture of animals, hit-and-runs or the refusal to yield seats to senior citizens on a bus are subject to being “hunted” down by netizens.
In a matter of hours, such personal information as names, locations, occupations and even telephone numbers of the “bad guys” can be revealed, to be scrutinized by netizens and television news channels for days until the perpetrators apologize to their victims.
To be fair, those who practice good deeds and help others may also receive their five minutes of fame, although the number of good Samaritan cases is a lot fewer.
The “justice of villagers” is a new phrase to describe this poetic justice, since Taiwanese netizens have called themselves “villagers.”
Judging from the results, the villagers, with their mass hunting expertise, have almost never disappointed in holding those “bad guys” accountable.
Several academics have observed the phenomenon and predict it is part of a new social cyberspace movement, which if necessary, can facilitate “real” social movement campaigns. A protest organized by netizen group Citizen 1985 over the death of army corporal Hung Chung-chiu (洪仲丘) last year was a perfect example, forcing the reform of the military judicial system.
Strangely, the sense of justice among Taiwanese did not spill out to the fields of broader perspective and historical context.
Netizens did not bother to make their voices heard in incidents such as the opaque signing of the cross-strait service trade agreement, the attempt by President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration to de-Taiwanize the country’s history in high-school textbooks, Ma’s distortion of the Constitution, his pro-unification policy and the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) ill-gotten assets, which have been haunting Taiwan’s democracy in the background for decades.
Perhaps the historical events occurred too long ago for most netizens to know they happened. Perhaps they have no interest in them whatsoever. Or perhaps they simply had trouble identifying the villains, which is not hard to do in most “mass-hunting” cases.
This should raise deep concerns, because real unfairness, injustice and “bad deeds” have been buried in historical events, documents and legislation.
It is a shame that most netizens say they do not have time to comb through what should be nothing more than a click of the mouse, a “like” on a Facebook page or a simple Internet mass hunting exercise.
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