Philip Jong

In social media, crowdsourcing has become a common and accepted practice to elicit ideas and feedbacks from the public-at-large online. The anonymity and accessibility of the internet have removed many barriers that would otherwise prevent this mass collaboration. In crowdsourcing, an inquiry is broadcast to an open community of participants (known as the crowd) who are tasked to respond back with information. Although the term crowdsourcing was first coined in only 2006, the first practice of crowdsourcing likely occurred centuries earlier. In the 19th century, the Oxford English Dictionary leveraged the public’s help to index all words in the English language by accepting submissions from volunteering contributors. In 2009, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) sponsored a competition in which teams were encouraged to leverage crowdsourcing in order to be the first one to locate a set of geomarkers that were previously hidden across the United States. Regardless of the medium wherein such practice is being used, the success of crowdsourcing depends entirely on the good will of the community and the motivation of its participants to contribute to the greater good of the crowd. Without this collective wisdom, crowdsourcing yields merely an incoherent collection of noise that is neither informative nor illuminating.

We are social creatures. With few exceptions, we prefer to be in the company of others with whom we can share our interests, our likes, and our dislikes. Over time, we make “friends” with those whom we consider to be trustworthy, sincere, and like-minded. We share personal information with our friends, through which we develop an emotional bond with them beyond that of mere acquaintances. However, the advent of online social media has redefined how we make “friends” in the digital age. In particular, the rising popularity of social networks has allowed those who choose to participate to expand their social reach and make quick connections with other individuals who have also chosen to participate. Yet, the ease by which such a relationship can develop undermines the standard by which we uphold to define a friendship. Making a “friend” on a social network often means merely sending an unsolicited request to an individual and waiting for the individual to approve the request to be included on a “friend” list. The act inherently bypasses all established etiquettes that otherwise screen out individuals whose motive for wanting to be a “friend” is neither sincere nor honorable. More importantly, defining our social reach by the number of “friends” we make on these social networks ignores the quality of the friendships by which we should instead judge the success of our social net worth. In other words, we must not be blinded by the lure of collecting “friends” in the virtual world and ignore the value of making “friends” in the real one.

It was exactly 10 years ago from today that the so-called Y2K bug threatened to cause catastrophic computer system failure worldwide. The bug was attributed to an oversight in computer programming in which dates were stored as data in an ambiguous format such that many software were unable to differentiate between years in different millennia that shared the same last two digits. As the countdown loomed closer to 1 January 2000 (when the rollover would occur), both public and private sectors began to escalate their efforts with unprecedented assiduity in a desperate attempt to fix affected software for which a malfunction would threaten our global security or economy. At the same time, the prospect that critical city services and infrastructures might collapse at the turn of the millennium because of a peculiar software glitch fueled growing fear among the public, many of whom had scarce understanding of the true nature of the underlying problem.

Fortunately, with few exceptions, the Y2K crisis turned out to be a non-event. No globally significant major computer system failure occurred. Proponents argued that the absence of a catastrophe was prima facie proof of the success of the preemptive measures taken to address the problem. Opponents argued that the crisis was largely overblown and the panic expressed by the public was mostly unnecessary. Skeptics also claimed that countries which had invested much less intensive remediation effort apparently experienced no more Y2K-related problems than countries which had invested much more.

It is unlikely that we will ever know the full potential impact of the Y2K crisis. The truth, however, likely lies somewhere in between the opposing speculations. Regardless, the Y2K crisis has served to warn us of the danger in our dependence on technology and, more importantly, teach us that indeed an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Just like a local school playground, the online digital playground is sadly populated by bullies preying on vulnerable victims with intent to cause harm (both physical and emotional), humiliation, or intimidation. Unlike the local school bullies, however, these online digital bullies often cowardly hide behind the veil of anonymity offered by the internet, in attempts to escape the consequences of their immoral actions. Teenagers and young adults, who form a large part of today’s online community, are particularly susceptible targets of cyberbulling because of their age, at a time when their social circles may be predominantly driven by their online personae. In recent years, the dangers of cyberbulling have received increasing attention from the mainstream media, after incidents of suicides have allegedly been attributed to relentless cyberbulling, often by adults. Unfortunately, current legislation in many countries, including Canada, is inept to deal with cyberbulling and to hold these bullies who make such infarction accountable. As an avid online user myself, I am intolerant of anyone who makes willful gestures that can be seen as acts of cyberbulling, regardless of their motivations and justifications. Cyberbulling is a societal crime, and our society and its citizens must be protected from it.

A great strength of the internet is the online anonymity it offers to its users. This anonymity, when used in proper context, protects us from political or religious prosecution, ensures our freedom of speech, maintains transparency in the democratic process, and guarantees our rights to privacy. Yet, on the internet, anonymity is frequently misused, both intentionally and unintentionally, so to make it difficult for proponents to defend its use. At a minimum, the etiquette of online behaviors has fallen to a new low—bashing, trashing, trolling, and other antisocial misbehaviors that exist solely to confront without just cause—being mean for the sake of being mean. It underlines a fundamental flaw in human social behavior: when we no longer need to answer to our own actions, we naturally choose to be selfish, self-centered, immature, and vindictive. It is not simply a matter of a need to state an opinion honestly and anonymously, but a matter of a need to state one’s own opinion rudely with the sole intent to deflate the legitimacy of others. It may be true that proper online etiquette has never existed, but this must not stop us from pursuing it and holding ourselves to a more civil standard.

Having recently celebrated my birthday, I reminisced about the memories of my own childhood in Hong Kong. After searching long for old personal memorabilia, I only found a handful of dated photographs taken of me as a baby and a young boy. The colors in the pictures had mostly faded, and many of the prints were badly cracked. There were no negatives kept for these photos because of the added film expense at the time. Looking back, I regret for not having kept a better pictorial record of myself—not for reasons of vanity, but for the prosperity of my family in the future.

Today, it is much easier for anyone to create and keep a record of one’s life (even after one’s death). This “digital footprint” can take the form of digital photographs, digital recordings of audio and video, digital scans of handwritten documents, personal blogs (such as this blog I am now writing), personal websites, and many other online presence. As technology and the internet continue to grow, so will our footprint left in this digital world. Unlike our ancestors, our legacy will not be pieced together by morsels of rotting artifacts buried in the earth but by streams of bits and bytes of digital information perpetually stored for eternity.

Years ago, I chose to register my own name as a .com domain. At the time, I did it more for novelty than for a need to secure an identity for myself. For most people, the need to establish oneself as a global individual seems both superfluous and egotistical. Yet, as we choose to increasingly congregate in this global village (both virtual and real) of ours, we are also unwittingly forfeiting our individual identity to exist in this shared space. This is because, in the history of civilization, societies have never seen a need to establish a global system to identity their citizens. Such identities are not meant to be exploited by a government to control its people. Rather, they are meant to liberate the people to exist with a global presence so that any oppression of an individual can be openly challenged. Much like a global corporation that struggles to keep its brand, a global individual must fight to maintain a distinct identity. We cannot afford to be lost in this world, and the world cannot afford to lose us as individuals.

Last month the American Medical Association (AMA) rejected a controversial proposal to classify video game addition as a mental disorder. As both an avid gamer and a health professional myself, I applaud the decision by the AMA to instead recommend that more rigorous scientific research be done to study this phenomena (or epiphenomena). I make no claim to have any medical knowledge on addiction; still, I find it troublesome to label the overuse of video gaming as an addiction akin to alcohol or drug addiction. This is because the mere overuse or overindulgence of an activity, such as video gaming, cannot by itself define it to be an addiction. Not only such an act wrongly promotes a societal stereotype (of a video game “junkie"), the act of labeling (someone to have a disease when there is none) may even be medically harmful. It may lead to a misdiagnosis of an underlying illness (mental or physical) for which so-called video game addiction is simply an epiphenomena or a mere sign of an undiagnosed disease. Undoubtedly, there are rare cases of individuals (particularly adolescents) reported by the mainstream media in whom playing video games has led to addiction-like behaviors. In these cases, however, it is more (or equally) likely that these individuals are suffering from some other legitimate mental disorders for which playing video games has simply become a platform for the underlying disease to manifest. In other words, until science can validate such claims, diagnosing video addiction today may be akin to diagnosing “female hysteria” centuries ago, a practice that once led to the ludicrous use of pelvic massage to treat a phantom disease.

Last month, Research In Motion suffered an unforeseen system failure that caused an interruption of its email service to all Canadian users of its BlackBerry devices. BlackBerrys are mobile devices widely used among business executives, professionals (including doctors and lawyers), and even politicians. Despite that the service interruption lasted only less than a day, the outage made much news in the mainstream media which reported many users to be suffering from the so-called CrackBerry withdrawal during the service outage. As a longtime avid technology user, I have been mindful not to let myself to grow addicted to using such a device, regardless of the potential great convenience that the device seemingly offers to its users. I believe that we must only use technology to enrich the lives we live but not to let technology dictate instead how our lives are to be lived daily. In this extreme, it is distributing to see that we can grow so attached on such technology, as if it replaces all real forms of human interactions in our desire to communicate. Rather, we must learn to detach ourselves from becoming the slaves of such technology, for otherwise we may find ourselves one day unable and unwilling to live our lives any other way without it.

The internet is increasingly becoming a platform for creative self-expression and exhibitionism. It has become a public stage for anyone who is willing to perform for the masses to see. Nowhere is this more true on the web than with the current popularity of user-generated contents in new media creation. Web services such as YouTube and Flickr allow users to upload and share self-made videos and photos online with anyone freely on the internet. The subject matters in these user-created media are often personal and frivolous, and the contents within are largely unfiltered and juvenile. Mostly, for the creators of these media, they serve little purpose except as a form of self-liberation. Equally, for the viewers of such contents, they serve little purpose except as a form of guilt-free voyeurism. In the extreme, this form of online exhibitionism uses live video and audio feeds to broadcast a person’s daily life, online and nonstop 24/7, on the internet. In effect, this is The Truman Show (an otherwise fictional drama) coming to real life. Perhaps we have always been preoccupied with the need to stroke our own ego, but it is not until now that the internet has provided such a simple means to soothe our own vanity.