Our Frenemy, the Internet

Around the world for the past twenty years, the internet has proven itself humanity's biggest frenemy, a word probably invented by the internet. It allows us to connect with forgotten friends, distant relatives, and spend our days looking at pictures of kittens.

My Internet

Unfortunately, it also enables the trolls that lurk beneath seemingly normal people to crawl out from under the bridges of our subconscious. And worse than those who attempt to incite World War III beneath YouTube videos are the convert trolls who once new better. 

Capitalizing on viral videos, purported "studies," and BuzzFeed listicles, the mainstream press fans the flames of our baser ire until the most mundane of grievances become campaigns, or worse: the prejudice this nation has been desperately trying to tackle is exploited, maneuvered, and strategically directed to the point of discourse that sells advertisements. 

Journalism has always been vaguely jaundice. But on the worldwide web, tabloid ethics have been buried beneath subjective data and ten cent words. The media doesn't want to report on our justified outrage, they want our outrage to be unjustified. News is boring. Riots are juicy. And readers keep falling for it.

Rob Bliss Creative's viral video, "10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman" alleges that an actress received more than a hundred "offensive" comments that were secretly recorded. Some comments were what one would unfortunately expect: catcalls, and some truly creepy encounters. But if you objectively look at the video, you'll realize that the most offensive comments are buried under comments like "How are the this morning?" and "Have a nice day." The short video doesn't include all one hundred comments, so what was left on the cutting room floor? 

Objectivity. 

Rob Bliss Creative even bills itself as a "Viral Video Marketing Agency." Their business model is hype, and they succeeded in getting the video featured in the mainstream media around the world, none of which addressed the subjectivity of the so-called experiment.

Further down the rabbit hole into absurdity, social media including Tumblr and user content listicles prompted New York to address the behavior of "manspreading." Manspreading, if our frenemy the internet is to be believed, is an epidemic of men taking up too much room on subway trains. Granted, some of the photographs are absurd, some even comical. 

But again, what's lost is any objectivity in a global ocean of photographs hand selected from hundreds of subways and millions of passengers. 

What both instances inadvertently point to - if reason or logic is to be considered - is New York's, and even the greater world's, increasing resistance to interact on any real level. 

Thank you, internet. 

When did "good morning" become a threat? When did people become afraid to ask, "Hey, dick hole, can you move your legs?" And when did New Yorkers expect New Yorkers to be courteous? 

But what's worse than the internet's complete lack of objectivity, or the fact that it duped us into believing that the Men of New York are unilateral pigs, is that both campaigns have painted women as passive nags too timid to speak without the comfort of a blog. In an attempt to expose double standards, these campaigns accidentally created new ones that shouldn't exist.

The trend in the media's exploitation of peoples' anxieties treads into even more dangerous territories. In the United States, right now, that would be in Ferguson, MO and the protests taking place around the country. Like the George Zimmerman trial in Florida, Ferguson was supposed to be the media's next golden ticket. A case that would define racism in America. But when it largely flopped and proved not to be so legally cut and dry, the media made it black and white. 

In the end, the media got what it wanted. A complete train wreck. 

A nation of racial harmony doesn't get clicks and sell subscriptions. For all the bitching and moaning we do about partisan bias in the press, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox want the exact same thing: to pit us against each other until we give them a story with no roof.

The trifecta of yellow journalism - CNN, MSNBC, and Fox - and the bilge wanter they stew in - BuzzFeed and HuffingtonPost.com - don't profit on news, they profit on the chaos that they orchestrate. When "manspreading" finds headlines above murder, rape, Gaza, and homeless veterans, we need to step back and take things into perspective, and maybe ask ourselves if it's time for the mainstream media to go the way of the printing press.

It might be tough to accept, but people are not as bad as our frenemy the internet says we are. Why else would there be so many pictures of cats?

Hollaback: Junk Science

By now you've probably seen the viral Hollaback video. Rob Bliss Creative hired an attractive female actress to walk around New York City for ten hours, secretly filming her. What was found was disturbing, if not sadly expected. In the short two minute video, the woman was harassed with catcalls and whistles a staggering hundred times and counting. 

It's unsettling, upsetting, and exposes just how inconsiderate men can be towards women, even in public. Basically, it's everything a viral video should be, right down to the soundtrack.

There's just one problem. The social experiment isn't just flawed, it technically isn't even an experiment.

I've resisted writing about the Hollaback video for two reasons. One, the science behind true experiments, social or otherwise, is dry. That's why viral videos masquerade behind junk science. No one wants to read about hypotheses and scientific methodology, and video bloggers can't take the time to scrap their experiments when confounding variables arise. 

You're yawning now, and that's why science doesn't sell.

But more importantly, I simply didn't want to criticize a video that has led to even more online harassment well beyond a ten hour walk around New York City. If being catcalled isn't inconsiderate enough, death threats are surely terrifying.

Unfortunately, with an internet full of fly-by-night "social studies," it's hard to criticize anything that attempts to expose harassment without sounding like harassment itself. Zeynep Tufekci of medium.com did a fine job of explaining the flaws in Rob Bliss's experiment without downplaying the harassment that exists. 

However good intentioned, these experiments are social irresponsible, painfully evident in the backlash the video and its' actress have received. Social experiments are important, and one on street harassment can have merit. But it's important, especially when dealing with sensitive issues and your subjects' safety, to be vigilant in how these experiments are performed. And to be prepared to prove that the science behind your experiment holds water.

But the sensitivity targeted by these experiments is the problem. Science and conscience don't mix. Experiments like Hollaback attempt to instill sympathy and outrage, but there is no place for passion in scientific experiments. Science is blind and sometimes exposes ugly truths about humanity, and not always where it's hypothesized. 

Perhaps more scientifically interesting than the 100+ catcalls is the underlying reason Rob Bliss chose to spend more than 50% of the experiment in predominantly African American neighborhoods. Rob Bliss went into his own experiment to prove a prejudice against women, only to expose his own prejudices.