Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 54 USERS: A YOU GRADE IT Call Me Mr. Feet
By Jacob Clifton | Season 5 | Episode 9 | Aired on 11.24.2013
So in this case news networks, hungry for something to report on, blew the Sunil stuff out of proportion -- I personally remember the craziest point of all that, when the circular nature of this brought it all the way around and people were howling about how Reddit and crowdsourcing were vindicated by this, under the assumption that credible news outlets were verifying their crazy-people information rather than reproducing it wholesale from a common source -- and then when it turned out to be disastrously untrue, the Redditors en masse were blamed for something that actually made sense for them to do.
Out of this hazy idea -- linking Anonymous, Reddit, 4chan and the inability to conceptualize the infinite viewpoints represented in the chaos of crowdsourcing into some muddled concept of verifiability -- the networks tripped over their own presumptions about themselves and the primacy of their subjective understanding of the internet and media in 2013, and then blamed people who were doing what they always do, used to a certain cover of not being taken seriously. It's like if you showed an old person a YouTube video made by Birthers, or Inside-Jobbers, you'd redefine reality for them and they would think that Obama is Kenyan, or 9/11 was a Republican plot.
Everybody thought everybody else was driving the reality bus, when in fact the people at the wheel were exactly the people most likely to accept things at face value because they don't understand the internet: They put kids at the wheel and then blamed them for the bus crashing, essentially. And that is fascinating to me, especially given the F/A vs. LG storylines this season, of how sometimes two groups doing what makes sense to them ends up in no-fault monstrosities, which the groups then have no reason not to blame on each other. One group with a built-up skeptical immunity and the other group with no reason to have those antibodies, and then pitting them against each other, and then several boys end up literally dead.
To show you what I mean, here's the highly intelligent, mostly inspiring and thoughtful Reddit thread about this episode of The Good Wife, in which the whole thing is hashed out, both with 20/20 hindsight about the Witch Hunt itself, and the way the site and community were represented on the show. I don't do Reddit because it does attract terrible people and talks about things that mostly don't interest me, but I was open enough to reading about it that I sought it out this morning, and was impressed by what I saw.
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