Journal 5

I have been slacking on blogging for the past two weeks so I have to get all caught up! We have been reading Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. The first incident he writes about in his book is how a man named Evan went above and beyond using social media to retrieve his friends phone that was left in a cab. His friend ended up getting a new phone and somehow pictures of the person who found the phone in the cab and was now using it for her own benefit, showed up on the new phone. When Evan reached out to the finder of the phone she was no way about to give it back to Evan's friend. In response to not getting the phone back, Evan kept trying to convince the young girl to give the phone back and when she was reluctant he started a website about what was going on. The site talked about the injustice of how this young girl would not give the phone back and people started to jump on the bandwagon and overreact. People were able to find the girl's myspace page and started posting photos of her to the site and writing about how horrible she was for not returning the phone. Evan got so upset that he saw justice was not being served he tried to get the NYPD involved and when there wasn't really anything they could do the followers of Evans website started to take this incident personally. In the end, Evan's justice was served and the NYPD retrieved the phone.

This whole story really bothered me and I could probably blog about how psychologically ridiculous Evan took this whole fiasco as well as the community that he had built revolving the incident. Luckily for you, this is not a psych class, so I won't get too much into it. The crazy thing that I believe Shirky was saying was how technology, the internet, and more specifically social media can bring groups together. Shirky says that "When we change the way we communicate, we change society." It is crazy how the people that followed Evan's site took what happened so personally and wanted justice to be sought out even though they did not know Evan, or his friend. Social media has give the world an opportunity to come together by communication. People can come together and get in arguments with each other, which unfortunately I see on Facebook everyday, or they can come together and fight for a cause. One thing that was brought to mind while thinking about the internet though is the struggle the world is having/going to have to maintain separate cultures. I am worried that soon cultures are going to start blending together and some will be lost forever.