The Ignorance of the Crowd

When I first started using the web, when I was young and naive, I foolishly thought that one of the wonderful things about it was the opportunity it afforded everyone to freely express their opinions. The days of being shouted down by morons who didn't like what you were saying, and weren't prepared to even give you a fair hearing, were a thing of the past. Sadly, the opposite seems to have happened. The web has evolved into a medium whereby everyone can shout down everyone else's opinion via social networking sites, blog comments, message boards and the like. Hate campaigns can be quickly mounted and their targets bullied off of the web. It's one of the reasons I don't allow comments on stories on The Sleaze and I make it as difficult as possible to comment here. I can do without the moronic bile which, all too often, passes for opinion on the web. All of which, in a roundabout way, brings me to the point of this post. To take a recent example of this mob mentality in action, just look at the furious online reaction to the campaign by recording artists to try and curb the illegal downloading of their work. You'd think that they had been calling for the murder of every first born child in Europe, such was the strength of the reaction, rather than simply expressing an opinion that the internet mob disagreed with. Not that any of their counter 'arguments' (if you can call them that), had any merit. They seemed simply to be whingeing about how outrageous it was that these wealthy an successful pop singers wanted to stop them from getting their work for free. Lily Allen, in particular, seemed to be the primary recipient of the venom. She'd made the unforgivable mistake of setting out a coherent and perfectly reasonable defence of her position on Twitter. Always a bad move to invoke reason and logic when dealing with baying mobs.

It is the focus upon the relative wealth and success of the recording artists in this case which provides the key to the 'mob mentality'. In common with the majority of such outbreaks of public cyber-bullying, it isn't so much the opinions the targets are expressing, but the relative success (measured in wealth, in this case), of the targets. The reality is that most web users are essentially 'passive', in that they don't actually create any of the content they consume. Many of them, whilst willing to consume this content, seem to resent the fact that those who created it ultimately have ownership of it, and hate it when they exercise this ownership by expecting payment for their work. After all, how else can you explain such an extreme reaction? Why shouldn't artists expect to receive payment for something they have worked hard to create, particularly when it is their main source of income? The fact that they might already be wealthy, due to prior success in producing unique original content is irrelevant. It is a matter of principle, surely? Trying to claim that they are merely puppets of voracious, profit-hungry record companies is simply an attempt to evade the point. The record companies might, indeed, be over-pricing music so as to increase their profits, but not paying for ultimately hits the artists, who have no control over such things.

But you don't have to be a famous recording artist to feel the wrath of the crowd. I have no doubt that the kind of vitriolic comments many of us have suffered on our own sites, or the ignorant bitching about our stories on message boards, is the result of this resentment against creativity harboured by the mob. Indeed, I'm sure that such reactions are an attempt by those responsible to exercise some kind of 'creative collaboration', thereby giving them some kind of spurious 'ownership' of your content. Just like the music artists, we frequently get our content ripped-off by other sites. Unlike the recording artists, we don't just suffer a potential loss of income here (from advertising, for instance), but also a complete loss of ownership, as the story often ends up without any accreditation at all, or sometimes even accredited to someone else! Damn it, I've even stumbled across people on message boards claiming to be me! I find the idea that anyone would think that they could gain some kind of credibility by pretending to be Doc Sleaze very perplexing! But, of course, it's the creative angle again - by claiming to be me, they can claim authorship of my work and believe that this, somehow, gives them kudos in certain circles. Sad bastards!