[Smashy the Hammer] [An Aspiring Luddite]
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An aspiring Luddite
In a wired world.
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[Jeff Berry]
Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he migrated to the Fediverse. He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance. He hates cell-phones.

The Butterfly Effect for the Internet Age
12 November 2010

[Picture of Apples] It's the Butterfly Effect for the Internet Age. A virtual butterfly flaps its wings and an internet tsunami sweeps through the blogosphere. The story goes like this.

A graduate student in a fairly obscure sub-specialty of medieval history reads a paper to twenty people at a conference in Manhattan on a Friday and references a medieval recipe collection called Forme of Cury. The following Monday, one of his friends who heard the paper shows him a page from a small magazine she found in a coffee shop in the Berkshires over the weekend. It's an article also referencing the Forme of Cury. She'd only heard of this book twice, and it was on two consecutive days.

The grad student thinks he recognizes the article, so he pokes around for a few moments on the web, as one does, and realizes it was written a few years back by a friend of his. He sends an email to the author asking if she knows about her article being used in this magazine, and suggesting she take action if she doesn't. If she does know, he wonders if the author has any marketing tips to share.

The author doesn't know her article is being used and contacts the magazine. For a few days, she and the editor exchange emails, in which the editor becomes increasingly condescending and dismissive. In frustration, the author posts to her blog.

Twenty-four hours later, the magazine is in tatters, the editor is the most-hated woman on the web - or at least a particular part of the web - and the author is a cause célèbre in big chunks of the blogosphere. The story has been around the world and back.

I are the Intarwebz. Fear me.

It was the Perfect Viral Storm. An underdog little guy (or girl) was being abused by a really annoying bad guy (or girl), who was clearly in the wrong and whose emails were sufficiently outrageous to be easy targets (the editor claimed, among other things that the entire web was public domain). It touched a nerve, got a nod from a few people with a higher profile than the author herself, and spiraled upward. A heart-warming tale of Internet justice.

Well, sort of. Heart-warming in this case, because the editor was, it seems, a serial copyright violator as well as an outright plagiarist. But a cautionary tale as well, because the lynch mob had already formed before the supporting evidence had really appeared. Although the magazine was cribbing from a variety of web-sites, including some rather high-profile ones, that fact was discovered well after the magazine was being massacred on Face book, with the attack sparked by two blog entries quoting the same email.

That's mob justice and that's scary. In this case, the target was a woman who was clearly wrong, who was breaking the law, but who probably isn't evil. (As Hanlon's Razor states, "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.") The story now has a life of its own, however, and the facts are already mutating and crystallizing with each new posting. As major news outlets pick up on the story, they rewrite it slightly, probably to avoid having copyright issues themselves, but also to emphasize the parts they think are important, and each subsequent rewrite is a little further from the original and from the reality.

"History," Winston Churchill said, "is written by the victors." This history was written on water by the winds of an Internet storm. So, who, I wonder is the victor?


Links to more stories:
Illadore's Blog
Rant from Edrants.com
The author is a graduate student in a fairly obscure sub-specialty of medieval history. © 2010 Jeff Berry
The Aspiring Luddite