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Road Rage on the Digital Highway
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| Globe and Mail, February 2, 2006 By Russell Smith Another bizarre Internet story this week: A photographer in Toronto takes a series of pictures of a confrontation between a female bicycle courier and a male SUV driver. He says the cyclist was angry at the driver for littering, the driver throws coffee on her, then she scratches his car with her keys, then he gets out of the car and starts fighting with her, at which point onlookers step in and separate them. The photos are close and clear, and they begin with the driver out of the car and trying to mangle the woman's bike. The photographer, Adam Krawesky, who calls himself Hool, posted the pictures on a photoblog called Citynoise (http://www.citynoise.org), which is a "community" blog: People post images or anecdotes about the urban experience there. It's an international forum, and you can search for stories or images by city. Krawesky is an excellent photographer, and has posted a number of photo-essays about the city. He says he just happened to be snapping some shots of Kensington Market when the fight broke out. And this is indeed an urban experience -- the pictures are dramatic and troubling. What's even more interesting, though, is the attention they garnered. The comments on Citynoise began quickly: Within a few hours there were literally hundreds. A massive argument began over who was in the right, whether the photos were real, whether automobile drivers were all jerks, whether such confrontations constituted vigilantism, whether women were all idiots . . . the pages of argument take up so much space that it will take several minutes for your computer to load the very first link. The next day, someone posted a link to the photos and the arguments on Metafilter (http://www.metafilter.com), the U.S. community blog that tends to attract university-educated, liberal participants (and which also plays an important role as place of dissent from current U.S. policy, and a place of sharply critical analysis of U.S. media). By Monday afternoon, the Citynoise blog had registered 98,778 visits to the site in the previous five days, and a parallel discussion had begun on Metafilter -- and on a number of other blogs around the world -- about the merits of the combatants, but also about the level of discussion on Citynoise, and what it revealed. Then The Toronto Star picked up on the story and ran the photographs on its front page on Tuesday. The Citynoise site promptly went down, probably due to too much traffic. What did the discussion reveal? I have never understood why anyone would want to post anything on these forums: You don't know who you're arguing with and why would you care what they think? Furthermore, any and all discussions of any import are turned to mush by the inevitable insults, and insults lead to counterinsults, until you're simply name-calling. That's exactly what happened in this case, and it created an interesting parallel: A case of road rage, when discussed, very rapidly led to road rage on the digital highway. The flameouts in this thread were instant and hysterical: All SUV drivers are scum, all hippie do-gooder girls are scum (worse language than that, though, was used), violence is what is needed, yeah, violence, violence, violence . . . at one point, it started to resemble a kind of group-induced hysteria, a two-minute hate. At one point, someone brought up the question of authenticity, so much in the news these days: How do we know if these pictures are real? The photographer responded by saying, simply: They're real, and you can believe me if you want to. Interestingly, the bicycle courier who was involved found out about the pictures and the discussion, and wrote a calm and articulate post explaining what happened from her point of view. (The cops asked her if she wanted to press charges and she declined. Interestingly, she is the mother of a child she is trying to teach not to litter.) So there is a sort of fact-checking at work here: Multiple posters will correct each other, and at some point, a witness will step forward. (The pictures, and the courier's post, do seem authentic to me, but I can't be sure.) The reporting, and its verification, happened about as fast as any mainstream news network could do it. The Internet is a parallel news network, spreading news much faster than we in the media can with all our technology and organization. The pictures were posted some time last Thursday; by Monday morning, the discussion about them had involved thousands of people from all over the world. By the time a newspaper ran the story the following day, it was old news on the Net. And why did these pictures not make it to the newspapers and the TV stations right away? They -- we -- would have loved to have them. I think, first of all, because it didn't occur to the photographer to go there with them. His first instinct was to post on-line. Not only is it easier to do this -- no phone call, just a mouse click -- but you can control how your story appears and how you get credit for it. And he knew, too, that his story's dissemination would be just as quick and just as effective. |
