In chapter 1 of Here Comes Everybody (‘It takes a village to find a phone) Clay Shirky relates the story of how our interconnectedness through communications technology is enabling collective surveillance and collective action. Someone steals a phone from a taxi in New York. The owner tries to get it back by sending a message to the phone asking for it to be returned. No luck. A friend of the owner of the phone then sets up a Web site and Bulletin board to publicise the injustice. … the injustice struck a chord and people started digging around on the Web and working out how to get the phone back … the whole episode gets picked up and followed by thousands of people who, by using their social networks and the communication tools that eextend them, make of a local injustice a global story: ‘the story ended up in more than sixty newspapers and radio and TV stations and more than 200 weblogs’ (Shirky 2008, 9).
‘The stolen sidekick’ makes an interesting case in showing how we’ve become connected, how an ‘audience’ becomes a contributor/co-author of a story, how the media become implicated, how the institutional bureaucracies are lagging behind (especially the police), and how networks can instigate collective action. It also illustrates many of the dilemmas around social media, surveillance, and privacy. A group was mobilised and rectified an injustice. Fine. But it could have been a mob exhorting an injustice. The tools, in this sense, are morally neutral.
The story that Shirky retells took place in 2006. It involved websites, bulletin boards, electronic mailing lists, MySpace, newspapers and TV stations.
In 2011 that whole array of media outlets has converged into one tool – Twitter. To see how that works, here’s another case – Sean Power’s use of Twitter to recover his stolen laptop. No only does this show the ways in which Twitter is becoming the tool of choice for coordinating social action as it unfolds, but the way the event is reported shows the emergence of some interesting tools to re-tell the story. In this case Brandon Ballenger has collated the tweets in the order that they were sent using storify in a way that makes compelling reading:
[View the story "Man tracks stolen laptop hundreds of miles away, calls thief" on Storify]
So, a new genre of narrative …? If this were a PR stunt or a simple fictional storyline, then it was certainly successful. As a piece of ‘reportage’ in real time it’s effective. As an archive of events, storify also shows us how personal misdemeanors can be lodged, logged and forevermore accessible. Sean Powers recovers his laptop but I wonder how long it’s going to take for Paulo Voltani to recover his reputation.
And if it had been an honest mistake …??