Don’t Mess with the Internet
March 24th, 2008 | by Brad King |This via Dave Thomas, my good friend and long-time game journalist who is also on The Modern Journalist mailing list.
Seems a SXSW attendee had his Xbox 360 stolen while he was attending the big Austin confab. The police weren’t helping out, so our intrepid investigator turned to Digg and Twitter to track down his wares, thanks in part to the online posse of equally perturbed netizens.
Here’s the story at Kotaku.
As everyone probably knows mob justice is a bitch and Digg Mob justice makes that look pretty. Since the story hit Digg the person who left the message asking for 360 ransom has been identified, his address and high school location posted, he’s been harassed, seemingly endlessly, via AIM.
Eventually the kid caved and told his parents, McPherson was, apparently in touch with them and now seems to have all of his stuff back. According to his Twitter, the kid actually hand-delivered some of the stolen goods on Sunday.
The brilliance of this once again illustrates the power of collected networks. Newspapers may have written the story (they didn’t), but true action took place outside the network. In other words, the paper would have — at best — been a conduit for others to find out about the story.
The Web and its affiliated social connections allowed for people to come together to solve problem. Which do you think is more valuable?
The one-to-many approach of newspapers is an old model, one that at best relies upon people to stumble across what some faceless unknown thinks is important. The many-to-many, Read/Write Web allows for the creation of ad-hoc networks forming around specific issues.
As our time grows limited, which seems the better use of time?
And by the way, if this story about the police is true, I wonder where the newspaper stories (or the follow up stories by the blogosphere) are?
