The Internet Ablaze

As CGM (Consumer Generated Media) becomes more and more widespread, “middle media” known as “CGM aggregators” are becoming popular. CGM aggregators filter through the flood of blogs and SNSs (Social Networking Service) to pick up notable articles or events going on in CGM. The proliferation of CGM has caused an overflow of information on the internet that is impossible to sift through; thus middle media is a way for consumers to access information that has already been screened, condensed. Middle media also acts as a bridge between CGM and mass media, that is, stories that are picked up by middle media are in turn, covered by mass media.

However, this seemingly convenient tool has also given rise to one of the newly rapidly escalating issues of the internet: “ablaze” sites and internet mob lynching. “Ablaze” sites and blogs was a term coined in Japan in 2005 when site after site was forced into closing after being picked up in middle media as “inappropriate” or “problematic” and millions of viewers rushed to the site, leaving angry comments, working together to expose individual information on the owner of the blog or site. Disagreements on the internet have a tendency to get emotional, heated, personal, and very self-righteous. In the heat of the moment, people work together to expose a person’s personal information very quickly, and contact related authorities or institutions to demand reparations and punishment. In fact, there are whole sites dedicated to the exposing and progression of their jihad against a particular individual. One such site is committed to reporting the actions of one college student working part time at a bookstore who secretly took a photo of a customer with a skin disease, posted it on his page in an SNS with derogatory comments. Another internet user with skin disease stumbled upon the page and reported it in a middle media, causing a mob of internet users to immediately flood the page with angry comments and the student was eventually forced to leave the SNS, not to mention that he was reported by one of them to his school and suspended.

Until only a few years ago, this kind of “mob lynching” was a tool only mass media enjoyed. They wielded a self-righteous power in what and how they reported, seeing themselves as the “voice of the people”, meting out social sanctions even before the law would come to a conclusion. However, as mass media and internet media work in unison, this phenomenon is only escalating. A common argument in defense of media is James Surowiecki’s “Wisdom of Crowds", in which he states that

Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them

However, he also notes that the conditions required for this is

(1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions. The diversity brings in different information; independence keeps people from being swayed by a single opinion leader; people's errors balance each other out; and including all opinions guarantees that the results are "smarter" than if a single expert had been in charge.

On the internet, while 2, 3, and 4 are satisfied, 1 is certainly not, and this mob mentality and urge to bandwagon out of fear of being ostracized is perhaps the biggest cause of internet mob lynching.

Blogging and Marketing in Japan and the U.S.

In a New York Times article published yesterday, blogging is touted as a “low-cost, high return marketing tool” for small businesses and certain guidelines like transparency and frequent updates are laid out.

Wal Mart and its PR firm Edelman came under fire in October when it was revealed that two bloggers writing positively about Wal Mart stores across the U.S. were actually hired to promote the company.

An article in Free Internet Press compares America’s “abrasive self-promotion” with Japan’s “conformist culture” which the article claims is apparent in the blogosphere. The article refers to Junko Kenetsuna, who reviews restaurants in her blog, “I had my lunch”:

In all the blog entries she has composed at home and in cybercafes over the years, Kenetsuna has never written a discouraging word - not a single critical reference to bad food, lousy service or rip-off prices, she said. Such harshness, in her view, would be improper and offensive.

"If I think the food stinks, I don't write it," said Kenetsuna, 43, who makes a living writing advertising copy for a weekly newspaper for female office workers in Tokyo.
"There is a part of me that feels sorry for the restaurant, if it were to lose business because of what I write," she said. "I don't want to influence the diners."

Although politeness is generally considered ethical, isn’t honest criticism more important for customer reviews? Is self-censoring negativity about another company more or less transparent than self-promoting oneself under a guise?

There’s a similar dilemma posed by blogs hosting advertisements. Japanese venture capitalist Joichi Ito recently began an online marketing tool in which bloggers choose the advertisements that appear on their sites. According to Business Week:

[AdButterfly] aims to put marketers directly in touch with bloggers. Like Google's (GOOG) AdSense and other similar services, AdButterfly relies on complex algorithms that automatically place ads on relevant Web sites run by bloggers who sign up. Marketers can also manually search for blogs whose subject matter is a good fit with the brand or products they're advertising.

AdButterfly, unlike AdSense and other rivals, gives bloggers the final say on the ads that appear and also allows blog owners to comment next to the advertisement. Ito believes this to be more “authentic” than “sly behind-the-scenes marketing techniques.” But the article also warns against filtering ads:

There are, of course, drawbacks to advertising on blogs, which don't have the long reach of mass media. And analysts worry that AdButterfly muddies the divide between paid-for endorsements and grassroots buzz. Not all bloggers are likely to come clean when there's a conflict of interest. "This model is both unique and murky," says Pete Blackshaw, executive vice-president of market researcher Nielsen Online Strategic Services. "My guess is that a set of informal rules will emerge."

Business Week says that despite the potential threat of bloggers running advertisements for companies they dislike just so they can criticize them, this has not yet happened on AdButterfly. This may be due to the “conformist culture” or the fact that the service is only used by about 2,000 Japanese bloggers as of yet.

With the growing trend of merging marketing with blogging, what role will cultural differences play? Japanese and English are the two most-used languages in the blogosphere and users of the two languages appear to have different marketing approaches.

Will Americans, who are supposedly more self-promotional and less averse to offending, abuse Japanese advertising tools? What sort of guidelines for online marketing might help bridge the alleged cultural divide?

Blogalization and its Discontents

A recent commenter travelling by the name I, Candyman, took sophisticated umbrage at my use of the term "blogosphere" to describe the imagined online community of weblogs, wikis and other such media that comprise our object of study.

"Oh wow. Every time I read the word 'blogosphere', a little part of my soul dies," he wrote.

Ever since, I have been toying with the idea of a new post titled "Blogosphere," comprising nothing more than an infinite repetition of the word "blogosphere" separated by double spaces. (Just to see what would happen.)

Instead, I give you an entirely new, evocative and likely annoying word-scramble for the Candymen of the world to seethe at: Blogalization.

Public Editor Seeks Civility (and finds it lacking at nytimes.com)

Clark Hoyt is the Public Editor of the New York Times (a position created in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal). His column this weekend, "Civil Discourse, Meet the Internet," began with the following disclaimer:

WARNING: This column contains rude and objectionable language not normally found in the pages of this newspaper but seen surprisingly often on its Web site.

As the title and warning suggest, Hoyt's column details the messy side of web interactivity. Most of the time, this is confined to boorishness. But the convention of anonymous posting in the blogosphere is particularly conducive to both unsupported claims and personal attacks. The traditional approach to journalism is being challenged, and informed by, so-called citizen journalism.

From Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, on down, executives and editors of The Times use similar language to describe their goal: they want the newspaper's Web site to nurture a healthy, "civil discourse" on the topics of the day.

As Hoyt notes, however, "the real Internet world often falls far short." He cites the challenges that vex Kate Phillips, editor of The Caucus, nytimes.com's political blog:

...Phillips said she struggles sometimes with the "intolerance" and "vitriol" she sees in some comments—so much so that on rare occasions "I almost wish we could go back to the days when we never heard their voices."

The most challenging ethical problems often require forbearance in the face of unruly, unexpected or undignified behavior. Yet, ethics is a normative pursuit, one whose ultimate purpose is to distinguish between the acceptable and unacceptable. Some have argued for an internet conversation ungoverned by standards. While you can't yell "Fire!" in a theater, you're still pretty free to write whatever you like online.

Is this what we want from the internet? Is this all we want from it?