Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Cyber-bullying
On May 15, 2008, a federal grand jury indicted Lori Drew for three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to obtain information to inflict emotional distress, and one count of criminal conspiracy. The victim of Drew’s actions, Megan Taylor Meier, was a teenager from Dardenne Prairie, Missouri who committed suicide by hanging at the age of 13 years. Her suicide was attributed to cyber-bullying through the social networking website MySpace. According to MySpace Terms & Conditions, cyber-bullying is prohibited because it is considered a tortuous activity. The Myspace suicide case is significant because it was the first time that a federal statute designed to combat computer crimes was used to prosecute abuses of a user agreement on a social networking site.
Youtube is another social networking site where users continuously disregard the user agreement and commit acts of cyber-bulling. According to Youtube’s Terms & Conditions, its users are prohibited from posting content that shows someone being physically hurt, attacked, or humiliated. However, anyone may view violations of these terms by watching the following video : “ATL Hoodrat aka SOULJA GIRL goes crazy on the Marta!” In this video the two violations you will see are Monica Pearson Ziyad aka ‘SOULJA GIRL’ threatening an elderly woman on a train and Ziyad herself being violently attacked by a male passenger. The video doesn’t mentions that Ziyad suffers from Bipolar disorder, which contributed to her irrational behavior. The title defames Ziyad’s character as she’s reduced to the status of an ATL Hoodrat. This video was viewed 1,953,765 times on Youtube and has generated lots of negative user reactions such as “all niggers should be shot on sight” by airwickairwick. DeafeningSlience2, who posted Ziyad’s video on Youtube is like Lori Drew in the Myspace suicide case in terms of user violations and cyber-bullying.
RJL Film 150
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I found this video somewhat disturbing and a perfect example of a viral video, especially since it's been shared by over a million users. Also, the concept of Cyber-bullying is a danger of the Network Society. Even though this video is cathartic to viewers, it has caused damage towards Ziyad and her image, and influenced racism towards African-Americans with negative user comments.
ReplyDeleteThis is a good example of how the internet can often lead to re-tribalization rather than collective intelligence. Anytime there is a video of someone behaving in a foolish manner, such as in this video, a large portion of the insults will be race-related. The comments section for a video will devolve into a race war even if it has nothing to do with the video. For example, if anyone makes fun of a rock video on YouTube, fans will automatically start bad-mouthing rap and having assumed that the heckler listens to rap, they will also assume that the heckler is black and start dropping racial slurs. The anonymity of the internet invites users to be on their worst behavior, and the increasing presence of the internet in our lives could cause major setbacks for race relations.
ReplyDelete-Adrian Crom
This video was big enough to be remediated. I remember seeing a bunch of remixes to it. Due to the fact Ziyad uses lyrics from rapper Soulja Boy, she is not taken seriously. Soulja Boy's credibility in the rap world is equivalent to Snakes on a Plane/Samuel L. Jackson. No one took this video seriously and found it humorous instead of offensive which caused it's popularity in remix form. The snark tone was evident in user-generated media. The Remixes embodied the collective intelligence that reflected the communities thoughts on Soulja Boy and his fans instead of the situation.
ReplyDelete-Diamond Alexander Drew
I found this video very interesting.. I actually did not realize that posted videos of racism or violence on Youtube was illegal because so many people post things like that very frequantly on there.In the article by Nicholas Negroponte he stated that, " What matters is words. Ans words are not going anywhere; they are one of the most powerful and efficient forms of human communication. What he meant by this was that these issues can cause war or peace, but in this video it can cause war and hatred to come back. There should be more ways to stop people from posting such things, because sooner or later people around the world will think these acts are okay, and they will reflect on the kids growing up today.
ReplyDelete