What Is Social Networking Anyway?
I don't blame members of the old generation for being confused by the Internet. It's a confusing place, constantly mutating and shifting, like a technological evolutionary race to find the coolest and the newest. But it's really embarrassing when they accuse it of being some lefty conspiracy to bully conservatives and the non-techsavvy. Jan Moir's Daily Mail column about how Steven Gately essentially died of "Gay" is a perfect example. She stated that there was a "heavily orchestrated internet campaign" against her.
Really? So Twitter users, for example, got together using mysterious social mobbing methods and went "Let's take Jan down?" She clearly doesn't understand what social networking is or even the basics of sites like Twitter, much less what a "trending topic" is. She seems to think that Twitter is some fanclub for lefty liberals that find out about what conservatives are saying and then sit there at their keyboards, taking potshots at them.
All that happened was that Twitter users (and everyone else) found out about the story, were incensed by it, and began sharing links and condemning her remarks. Her column was published and the public (not just the Left) criticised her for what she said. Plain and simple.
Her comments about the campaign being "heavily orchestrated" show she doesn't understand that what she's observing is news networking spreading information at lightspeed. There can be no agenda, or any kind of orchestration, here. Like a brain's conscience, which cannot be pinpointed but is known as an "emergent phenomenon" as it arises spontaneously as the result of the complexity of its otherwise simple components, social networking has a massing effect. Concepts like trending topics can only exist when there are a large number of participants and observers. But the fact that the vast majority of these participants are anonymous to each other makes any kind of large-scale organisation of their tweets, or the implementation of an agenda, absolutely impossible.
Moir's defence, therefore, comes across as nothing other than a messy mix of fuddy-duddy and paranoia.
Really? So Twitter users, for example, got together using mysterious social mobbing methods and went "Let's take Jan down?" She clearly doesn't understand what social networking is or even the basics of sites like Twitter, much less what a "trending topic" is. She seems to think that Twitter is some fanclub for lefty liberals that find out about what conservatives are saying and then sit there at their keyboards, taking potshots at them.
All that happened was that Twitter users (and everyone else) found out about the story, were incensed by it, and began sharing links and condemning her remarks. Her column was published and the public (not just the Left) criticised her for what she said. Plain and simple.
Her comments about the campaign being "heavily orchestrated" show she doesn't understand that what she's observing is news networking spreading information at lightspeed. There can be no agenda, or any kind of orchestration, here. Like a brain's conscience, which cannot be pinpointed but is known as an "emergent phenomenon" as it arises spontaneously as the result of the complexity of its otherwise simple components, social networking has a massing effect. Concepts like trending topics can only exist when there are a large number of participants and observers. But the fact that the vast majority of these participants are anonymous to each other makes any kind of large-scale organisation of their tweets, or the implementation of an agenda, absolutely impossible.
Moir's defence, therefore, comes across as nothing other than a messy mix of fuddy-duddy and paranoia.