Terrible Idea (.net)

This is going to be a long one…

A couple days ago I wrote about “internet justice” and its possible ill effect.  Jay replied in a comment, countering a few of my assumptions.  He made me realize that I hadn’t fully expressed what really bothered me about the story, and as I tried to fully express it, I realized that I didn’t fully agree with what I had written.  So, this post will be a two-parter.  Part I will be a re-working of the thoughts I was trying to express in the first post.  Then, in Part II, I’ll talk about my thoughts after having taken Jay’s comment into account.

I.

First, that article was poorly chosen to illustrate the worries I have — it is about a criminal case, and it is much more about the search than the carrying out of justice.  When the internet community found the car thief, they turned it over to the police, where it was prosecuted in the normal fashion.  I’m worried more about the situations where the criminal justice system won’t take over, because the perceived transgression isn’t a real crime.

The book I linked to in the original post, The Future of Reputation, has a perfect example in the first few pages of its introduction.  (As before, a disclaimer: I haven’t read the full book.)  In the example, a college student in South Korea who was caught on camera letting her dog poop on a subway train, and not cleaning it up.  As disgusting, rude, and even illegal as this may be, she didn’t deserve the backlash she got — information about her family was published online, and she was publicly shamed, and eventually forced to drop out of school.

This worries me.  It looks very much like Girard’s scapegoat mechanism.  I won’t go into all of the details of the scapegoat mechanism (which I studied in undergrad, and has shaped a lot of my thought), but the basic idea is that tensions in society build, until a point where they are released by the scapegoating of a single sacrificial individual.  All that is wrong with society is placed on one entity, and that entity is cast out, providing a cathartic release to the tensions.

This mechanism makes bearable the natural tensions and high tempers that are bound to flare whenever people live with one another in a society, but it is unjust to those who become the scapegoats.  From a Girardean perspective, our system of laws has developed as a way to resolve disputes and ease social tensions without resorting to the scapegoat mechanism.  But it is always lurking in the background.

Today, you don’t need to search too hard to find someone who will talk your ear off about how there are a ton of assholes in the world.  In a city, where you rarely if ever have to encounter the same person twice, it is nothing to be rude to a stranger.  This leads to tension.  Everyone hates all those rude people they encounter on the streets, and everyone loves to complain about them.  When the girl in South Korea didn’t clean up her dog’s mess, something snapped.

Read Don Park’s account of the incident.  People finally had someone on whom they could pin all of their pent-up rage, built up for all of those moments of rudeness on the streets.  They finally had their scapegoat, and they went at her with a vengance.  Don Park has it right when he calls it a witch hunt.

So this is what worries me about “internet justice” — because it is carried out by the mob, it has the very real danger of not being justice at all.

II.

OK, now, Jay commented on the original post, not the reworking I just did, but his point is still applicable.  Here’s the heart of what he had to say:

The implicit point that you are making is about the nature of humans. We choose to not forgive/trust. Yet, critical theory would point out that humans will change (evolve) when their circumstances require it. I think that people will have to learn to be more forgiving when everyone is indicted on some level (John 8:7).

Girard would say that people don’t learn to be more forgiving when everyone is indicted — they ignore their own transgressions, and foist them upon the scapegoat.  Girard would also say that our modern criminal justice system are the product of the a Chrisitanized Western society, which in turn is a product of Christ himself, who was able to show that the scapegoat mechanism was unjust and unnecessary — and John 8:7 is a perfect example.  The fact that the scapegoat mechanism is once again rearing its ugly head through the medium of the internet is an indication that society is devolving.

But putting all of these swirling thoughts to words has made me realize that my worries and concerns were based on assumptions and beliefs I no longer hold.  Girard would say that Christ’s ability to tear down the scapegoat mechanism is proof that he was divine — we humans could not overcome it on our own.  I disagree.  I hold humanity in a higher regard — we are capable of responding to problems the problems in our nature.  Society is resilient enough to absorb and account for new sources of strife and dischord.

So, relating this to my earlier post.  The eternal duration, easy searchability, and omnipresence of personal information on the internet makes it possible for mistakes and bad behavior to live on longer than they previously could.  But similar issues surely arose when writing was invented, or when the printing press came about.  After a period of adjusting, we will be able to handle the new ways that our mistakes may be published — either by becoming more forgiving as a society, by making fewer mistakes, or just getting better at hiding them.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 14th, 2008 at 11:37 pm and is filed under Law, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.