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
But I think the real story here is how crowdsourcing is no more invalid than any other activity technology allows us, in 2013, and no more valid either. None of the characters talk about this out loud, but it comes through in the savvy way they choose to represent the various sides of net-neutrality and the different interests that come to bear. Because with things like this it's not simply one thing or the other, it's not about making it a moral issue: It's being able to look at what is actually happening, thinking it through, which in cases like these tends to be strongly generational.
When you see something trending on Twitter, that means completely different things to you depending on how old you are. When you see something from an online source reiterated by a presumably otherwise-credible source, it still means something different to you. These conspiricists were tilting at windmills, in this case, but they were trying to help -- for personal reasons that run the gamut -- in the same way that Anonymous takes down bullies and so on.
Plenty of Reddit "witch hunts" work out for the betterment of mankind, but in every case you know what you're getting: A very lossy, very chaotic signal-to-noise ratio through which some truth may come from time to time. Also known as "the entire internet." You take it with salt, and they are giving it with salt: They know -- although in the moment you both might forget -- that this will all be over within hours, when they've moved on to some more interesting blip. Something you simply cannot explain to an old person, for perfectly valid and non-shameful reasons but nevertheless need to be factored in.
When you're used to getting the newspaper in the morning, or the TV news over breakfast, you can only go so far into the hinterlands of the web before your brain breaks. Crowdsourcing and online communities are... Steam, coalescing nuances out of individual droplets too small to see. If you go into a forum and read three people in a row saying, "Peter Florrick is an abusive husband," or whatever, you are going to think the whole world believes Peter Florrick to be an abusive husband. You will find it almost impossible to remember that in fact the evidence only shows that three people believe that. Three random people who may have no idea what they are talking about, who could be confused about who Peter Florrick is, who may be abusive husbands themselves who are projecting onto a TV character... Three people, out of seven billion in the world, self-selected for strong opinions about this particular topic: What on Earth makes you think that is worth putting on the news?
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