Slashdot Mirror
Korea's Online Aggression a Taste of the Future?
DerGeist writes "Imagine your life ruined by an organized mob that convicts with scant, unreliable evidence. Fueled only by hearsay and rumors, an invisible horde of your fellow citizens begins bombarding your snailbox, email, phone, work, school and family with threats, insults and general harassment. You are forced to drop out of school and quit your job as a result of constant attacks. You are shunned and ridiculed in public as anywhere you go, you are instantly recognized. Although it may seem to be just a second-rate Hollywood nightmare scenario reminiscent of "The Net," this sort of "organized mob" justice is being dealt out freely in South Korea where net usage is booming. So freely, in fact, that almost 1 in 10 of 13-65 year-olds has felt its sting. Could this trend hit the U.S.? Will policing net behavior eventually become necessary?"
If they are issuing "real" threats or abusing services, they should face the consequences of those abuses. It shouldn't require any new Internet Police(tm) or anything like that, the e--mailer/ISP/local rules for harassment, etc, or abuse of service should do it.
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I think that as we have also lost much of our sense of community in the US and the UK this kind of social pressure won't really have as much hold here.
One could suggest that South Koreans really need to get out more.
Who needs the net to ruin lives when you have the traditional media? Ask the parents of JonBenet Ramsey or Richard Jewel about having your life ruined by false accusations. Do you think CNN will ever have to pay for either spectacle?
an ill wind that blows no good
It happend to steve bartman when he got his hands on that foul ball headed for outfielder Moises Alou's mitt and a locke paper printed some of his puston info.
t =0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozi lla:en-US:official
http://www.google.com/search?q=steve+bartman&star
It already DOES happen. The guy who uploads naked pics of his ex, the guy who took a mugshot of his ex-buddie and posted it to somethingaweful, and not to forget the Star Wars Kid.
And let's not even get close to afternoon TV and other forms of "entertainment" that resemble a freak show more than anything.
Could it be worse? Would "online mobbing" be worse? Hardly. Online only means that more people learn about it, but 99.9999% of those don't care at all. They don't know you, wouldn't even recognize you if they met you on the street. What matters is your peers, and it is fairly easy to tell them about whatever you did supposedly do or say, with or without the 'net.
If you really want to mob someone to the point where he loses friends and family, you don't need the net. You only need gullible people, and they are running free in our streets.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm an American with a Korean wife. I speak Korean, and my wife, kids and I watch Korean TV shows together. We especially like the game shows. The game shows mostly have popular stars as participants.
Certain participants are so popular, that if a not-so-popular star insults a popular one (even during a game called "Dangyon Haji", or "Of Course", where the OBJECT of the game is to insult the other person until they quit), that not-so-popular one will get bombarded with hate e-mail, hate-posts, and sometimes they even get bombarded by physical objects! Their popularity drops dramatically. Some stars have been known to lose intentionally to avoid earning the wrath and ire of the "fans."
I don't think this has anything to do with the fact that they "teched-up" rapidly before online etiquette was formed. This has more to do with emotion-driven Korean culture. The word "fan" comes from "fanatic," and that is what some of the "fans" really are!
Last year my uncle has been the subject of his ex-lover's efforts to destroy his reputation on TV, Philippine newspapers & local blogosphere in a bid to get their child back, win in the court of popular opinion & for money. His ex-lover used her media & political connection to go on live TV to accuse my uncle of being a murderer, land grabber, gangster, etc (basically making him out as a Hannibal Lector if he was a lawyer) and told people to look him up on the Internet. Seeming she couldnt mention his name due to legal reasons she had to mention a Philippine Army General who harassed our family 15 years ago as a key word so people would know who he was.
You see my uncle is a lawyer who is a giant question mark in the mainstream media & the general public and it doesnt help his name shows up in a lot of court decisions posted on our government's Supreme Court website. For the curious by-stander who just happened to have a casual interest you would automically assume my uncle was truelly that "evil" seeming he was mentioned in so many contraversial Supreme Court cases. I do not blame people making such brash assumptions seeming court documents are long, wordy & use very legalistic terms that would cause any non-lawyer to scratch his head and make wild guesses. It is far easier to trust a female celebrity guesting on the local equivalent of the Oprah who bashes my uncle as the devil than to make the effort to get the whole unvarnished truth through court documents.
Because of these lengthy legal papers people automatically think all the things the ex-lover said was true, that he was a real monster.
If only people took the time to read the legal papers they'd see that the ex-lover was manipulating them. It pisses me off that the ex-lover had to dredge up our family feud & shame that legally ended with a Philippine Supreme Court decision back in 1991. I will probably never forgive her for that.
I can relate to the Korean fellow whose reputation was tarnished because of very malicious rumors & half truths spread by those who make assumptions.
I know a lot of people dont like lawyers but please, no taste-less jokes that lawyers deserve this kind of flack. I also know by not including links my post doesnt pack the punch that would really make the discussion & I apologize.
A female friend of mine was emailed by some guy on her myspace account. She told him she wasn't interested in dating, and he proceeded to email everyone on her "friends list" that she had an STD, this list included friends, family, coworkers, ex-boyfriends etc... So she's been trying to do 'damage control' for 3 weeks now at this falacy.
Even though it was probably some 'script kiddie', this kind of stuff being emailed to nontechies can be mortifying.
It is kind of different in East Asia, though. There is more of an expectation that you will not seek attention to yourself.
The Japanese hostages in Iraq were treated much more harshly by public opinion than American or European hostages were in those countries. Keep in mind that they were aid workers who had gone to help the Iraqi people but the Japanese public were quite hostile to them after their rescue, and they had to apologise to the public for the trouble and embarrasment they'd caused the government. (News story here) (blog post here)
This despite the fact that the deployment to Iraq was itself unpopular, and most people opposed it. I think the hostages were seen as embarrasing the country with the attention they were getting, and seeking fame for themselves.
What you describe is just people leaping to judgement of who commited a murder, which happens in every society.