Internet Resonance

This is a guest column written for the Chinese business magazine “China Electronic Business” (invested by Jack Ma of Alibaba) and IT news site Interfax.

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While in University, I studied – among other things – mechanical engineering and acoustics. Among the things I learned and did not forget is how important is the phenomenon of resonance. It can be very helpful or horribly destructive.

One thing for sure is that it can turn into a problem if you don’t take it into account: you can use resonance to help signals propagate far away, or destroy a structure. It is said that soldiers don’t walk synchronously on bridges to avoid its collapse.

Have you noticed the speed at which some information, pictures or videos go across the Internet? Mass media have had the power to spread information by “pushing” it for a long time. On the Internet, some ideas not originating from mass media can spread just as well, relayed voluntarily by thousands or millions of people, while others do not propagate much and fade quickly. We could call this phenomenon “Internet Resonance”.

While this might sound good at first – informing people in an instant – there are two worrying aspects:

1. Speed has nothing to do with accuracy.
2. Just like mechanical resonance, it can be as damaging as it can be beneficial.

Let’s look into some examples to illustrate.

Airport Lady and #AmazonFail

Sometime in 2008, I came across a video showing a very upset middle-aged Chinese woman who had just missed her plane . She was screaming, crying and rolling on the floor all at once. The link to the video was being forwarded to make fun of her over-the-top reaction. It was very entertaining.

Sometime later, I came across an article saying that the lady on the video was upset because she was on her way to visit her dying sister in hospital. It was suddenly much less entertaining – I was making fun of a person very desperate for very understandable reasons.

But thinking again I realized one new problem: I had no idea if the sister actually existed and if this other version was true. But one thing for sure is that this lady got instant fame. Today the number of views stands at over 6 million.

Another very interesting example involves the famous e-commerce giant Amazon.com and the LGBT community (the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transsexual). In April 2009, a new wave caught Twitter, the famous micro-blogging service: Amazon had de-listed LGBT books and was showing its true anti-LGBT colors!

The hashtag (keyword to “tag” messages on Twitter) #AmazonFail started to spread on Twitter – many users starting to include it in all their messages, making it emerge like a rumble on search engines as well. Even online community specialist Clay Shirky, writer and Professor of New Media at New York University and author of “Here Comes Everybody”, a reference book about online communities, relayed the message asking to boycott Amazon.

Cornered by the online crowd, the company had to explain it sudden repression of the LGBT group liberties. So Amazon explained that… they changed the ranking system for their content, especially adult ones, and were not quite sure about the specific case of LGBT books. In other words, the intention behind what happened was different from its effect. The crowd’s anger rapidly vanished but the damage was done.

Clay Shirky wrote a long and insightful commentary that probably very few among the AmazonFail torch-bearers read. We could forget about this and move on, but let’s examine the net effect and the phenomenon itself:

• Netizens attributed an intention to Amazon
• The message was interesting enough to spread like wildfire
• The message was inaccurate
• Amazon got awful PR
• Very few cared about the truth
• Last, who knows if Amazon’s explanation is true?

Maybe I should give a few numbers about this event. Here is what happened within 24 hours according to a blog which followed the event closely :

• #AmazonFail was the number one keyword on Twitter
• Over 5,000 blog posts relayed the message
• A Facebook group was created. It only has 3,771 members today. The last post is from July (3 months after the event) says:

  “So, has Amazon apologized or even explained yet? I haven’t forgotten AmazonFail. I now use IndieBound instead.”

  The post just before this one says:

  “If it’s fixed, why does it matter? Do people really need to make a facebook group and a big deal out of EVERYTHING?”.

• Online petitions appeared, collecting 9,000 signatures in a few hours
• A “Google Bomb” was planted: AmazonFail was the second result when searching “Amazon” on Google
• Logos and T-shirts were created
• A complaint letter was drafter for people to print and send to Amazon
• Within a few days, 335 articles appeared in mainstream media including the Wall Street Journal and Wired.

If you are familiar with “human flesh search engines” and the various cases in China involving corruption, marital affairs and animal cruelty, you will fell familiar to this situation (BTW, the Wikipedia article is inaccurate since much earlier cases have been reported in Korea with the “dog poop girl” and the US – know about the “lost sidekick”? See “Internet Vigilantism“).

First off, the message spread has little to do with its accuracy – this is no news as it has been the case with chain emails and before that, plain rumors.

Second, the truth is generally not as interesting, entertaining or outrageous and does not spread.

What can we do about it?

The problem is that as long as you are not the person being filmed and exposed in despair after missing your plane, it is hard to feel much empathy for the victim, and even harder to feel empathy for a global corporation. But it’s coming to you and me as sure as millions of us now carry mobile phones with cameras. Unless we all receive extensive media training, maintaining a composed image in all circumstances will rapidly prove tiring and many aspects of our personalities that do not quite fit with our public image will become visible. Celebrities (stars, politicians, etc.) are the first victims and paparazzi are no news to them, but the promise of “citizen journalists” is increasingly looking like there will be a large share of “citizen paparazzi” too!

It might, in a way, make us more “humane” – tolerating better others’ shortcomings as our own will also be visible, but will also change radically the way we relate to people, now that the complexity of their character and tastes become more apparent.

Another important lesson of those two cases is to reserve judgment. As frustrating as it might sound, it is a rare case we get the whole picture of an event as it is reported and impulsive and emotional reactions are unlikely to help.

So, will the overflow of information make us just dizzier as we act as mindless echo chambers, or make us more humane and improve our thinking?

Comments are welcome at info [at] plus8star.com. Our presentation on “From The Digital Panopticon to the Noosphere” is available on Slideshare.

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+8* | Plus Eight Star gets you out of your echo chamber to see how Asian companies can be ahead of the curve. We are also on Twitter!