Reclusland

Remember that little series I did on “Surveillance, Identity, and Meaning”, about how the internet and social networking tools would help us all police our own behavior? Well, here’s an example of it playing out in real life.

Anybody out there with a tumblr blog will probably appreciate more than those who don’t, but check out these recent article from the NY Times site:

Enforcing Manners, Tumblr Shuts Down 5 Blogs

Tumblr Lifts Its Ban on Critical Blogs

At the heart of the whole controversy is some woman who’s blog is often “reblogged” by other users, in order to ridicule her.  Classic “troll” behavior, updated slightly for the tumblr platform.

Tumblr responded to the controversy by changing their Terms of Service  and canceling all 5 of the blogs targeting the first blog.

But the dynamics of the situation is what I want to discuss.  We have a woman who constantly blogs about every aspect of her life, and we have the people who consider her lifestyle to be  rather vain, vacuous, and meaningless .

And they’re using the internet to point that out.

They are communicating to this woman that they consider certain aspects of her lifestyle to be  poisonous and empty, and she is free to either try to make her life a little less poisonous, or to ignore those people.  But either way, it’s wide-spread democratic feedback on her actions in real-time (as close as we can get, anyway).

By noticing which of her posts are ridiculed the most, she could learn a thing or two about how her behavior appears to others, when it’s taken out of the daily context of her own life as-lived-by-her.

Tumblr was quickly attacked by the blogosphere (again, real-time feedback in action) and they restored the canceled blogs the next day.  They also added a “block” feature, so that users can control who does and does not “reblog” their content.

This means that this woman who is putting her entire life online can choose to “block” this feedback, like people often do in real life, when they ignore the opinions of other.  But again, through the magic of our extended nervous system that is the internet, we can watch the entire process in action and compare it to the processes in our own life, to help us make better decisions in our own lives.

The self is finally able to study itself in action, with only a slight time delay.  Very important.

Also, and here’s even more horn-tooting, I got in a comment, lucky number 23, on the first article.  And not that it’s any big insight, but I totally called the solution…  ;)