July 14, 2005
"dog-sh..-girl" a test of the Internet's Power to Shame
Catching up on the news, I just learnt about this incident watching mobuzzTV.
A couple of weeks ago, Korean bloggers had field day over the behavior of a young woman who refused to clean up the mess after her dog pooped on the floor of a subway.
According to Japundit, "it began in a subway train with a girl whose dog made a mess on the train floor. When nearby elders told her to clean up the mess, she basically told them to f... off. One of the train riders took pictures of the incident with a camera phone of her and posted it, without any masking, on a popular website which started a nationwide witchhunt.
Within hours, she was labeled gae-ttong-nyue (dog-shit-girl) and her pictures and parodies were everywhere. Within days, her identity and her past were revealed. Request for information about her parents and relatives started popping up and people started to recognize her by the dog and the bag she was carrying as well as her watch, clearly visible in the original picture".
The “Dog excrement girl” incident that fueled netizens on the Internet last month in Korea then become food for thought among American bloggers.
According to English Donga, the Washington Post reported on the subject on July 7, saying that the case was “a remarkable show of Internet force and a peek into an unsettling corner of the future.”
"Jonathan Krim, who wrote the article, said, “In discussions with dozens of people about this story and in reading comments on several blogs, I found an intriguing common thread.” “Most people accept the Internet as a new social enforcement tool, but agreed to search for a certain level where enforcement does not go too far.
Online discussion groups crackled with chatter about every shred of the woman's life that could be found, and with debate over whether the Internet mob had gone too far. The incident became national news in South Korea and even was discussed in Sunday sermons in Korean churches in the Washington area.
Humiliated in public and indelibly marked, the woman reportedly quit her university.
The Dog Poop Girl case "involves a norm that most people would seemingly agree to -- clean up after your dog," wrote Daniel J. Solove, a George Washington University law professor who specializes in privacy issues, on one blog. "But having a permanent record of one's norm violations is upping the sanction to a whole new level... allowing bloggers to act as a cyber-posse, tracking down norm violators and branding them with digital scarlet letters."
The Columbia Journalism Review, who picked up on the story writes: "We've seen blogs act as media or political watchdogs, but not as aggressive watchdogs of individual violations of social norms. So this seems like a notable step.
...No doubt about it, the rise of citizen cyber-police such as those who tracked down and shamed the hapless Korean dog owner is a development with multiple ramifications. And trying to patrol these Internet lynch mobs may turn out to be just as impossible as trying to keep the world free of dog poop."
From OhMyNews: Netizen Debate Ensues Over 'Dog Poop Girl'
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