Dan Phiffer builds websites, makes art, and teaches in NYCOn Twitter a lot of people have been linking to the @herpderpedia account, which is retweeting people’s confused reactions to today’s Wikipedia blackout. On a mailing list I subscribe to, somebody wrote of this phenomenon:
It’s really amazing
A. how completely oblivious people are to the issues
B. how completely oblivious people are to the page they’re looking that explains why wikipedia is blacked out
C. how much I don’t want to live on this planet anymore
I share his sense of disappointment, but this kind of ironic distance is exactly what we don’t need right now. Instead, let’s have a little compassion for each other. Send those people links to help them understand why Wikipedia has gone dark today. That sharing capacity is exactly what this issue is all about.
I've been using my back pocket twitter account to politely send info to some of the retweeted. A few things of note:
Writing to something that they're an idiot is never helpful. It's really sad to a bunch of adults ragging on a Scottish teenager. https://twitter.com/#!/JohnHabashi/status/159712733623885825
A lot of the people expressing being retweeted are Scottish teenagers. No, not really, but many are from outside the US, or are teenagers, or both. Telling a Briton to contact their Senators is counterproductive. Non-Americans could rightly be annoyed at a local protest messing with their Internet. It's not surprising at all that teenagers don't care about some law and don't want to read a bunch of boring stuff. The wikipedia "learn more" page does a terrible job compressing the information into something easily comprehensible. Instead, it goes on at length with somewhat defensive paragraphs about the blackout. The page should be targeted at the visitor who has never heard of SOPA, not an editor-level user who is concerned about this new political tack.
Some of the retweets come from people who are being ironic, or are streaming a bunch of tweets about SOPA, one of which makes them look stupid out of context.
Some of the people who were retweeted have turned around and retweeted the productive comments they're receiving.
A number of the comments are just expressions of disgust or annoyance, but in the context of herpderpedia, they make the tweeter look stupid. E.g. https://twitter.com/#!/JosephSprauer/status/159747980629516291
A lot of people use twitter to ask what's going on. It's a little hypocritical for the techy world to share xkcd earthquake comics, and then condemn people who go on twitter to ask their friends what's going on. A lot of the tweets are coming from smart and no-too-smart phones, which means that people are seeing wikipedia (maybe in trending topics) and then just asking what's up based on a bunch of half-truths. That's kind of a smart way to use twitter, actually.
Yeah, I tried sending the Shirky video along to some of those @herpderpedia folks, hoping to clarify things for them. But like you said, it's really easy to misread people's posts when they're taken out of context. I decided not to try sending stuff to everyone, which probably would have gotten my account flagged for spamming anyway.
It's a tricky thing with the international users. While it's true they haven't got any representation in US government, they certainly have just as much at stake in keeping these sites running without censorship. Perhaps more, since the politicians seem to be emphasizing the threat of "foreign websites" in their talking points about SOPA/PIPA.
Maybe these users should be the most enthusiastic "slactivists" (to use Malcolm Gladwell's term). They should be the ones bothering us Americans to go call our representatives! And I'm sure that's happened a lot in the last few days.
I'm just really conflicted about how readily we collectively meme-ify any old thing online, so long as it can make us chuckle. Even when it's at the expense of those who we should be reaching out to in solidarity. The internet had a good showing today, activism-wise, but I think us rank-and-file users could do better.