The village elite

We live in an era where more and more of us have less faith in our betters.

Consider, for example, the case of Alexandra Samuel. Who is she? Here is her blurb:

Alexandra Samuel is the Director of the Social + Interactive Media Centre at Emily Carr University and the co-founder of Social Signal.

And her blog is published under the auspices of the Harvard Business Review.

She is deeply troubled by what happened in Vancouver. Not by the riots themselves, which she assures us she can take in stride. No, what troubles her is that ordinary citizens might use social media to help get the idiots responsible for this arrested.

But it's one thing to take pictures as part of the process of telling your story, or as part of your (paid or unpaid) work as a citizen journalist. It's another thing entirely to take and post pictures and videos with the explicit intention of identifying illegal (or potentially illegal) activity. At that moment you are no longer engaging in citizen journalism; you're engaging in citizen surveillance.

Because engaging in citizen surveillance is a self-evidently bad thing? As opposed to, say, a morally good and caring thing we can do for the good of the community we all share and value.

She goes on:

What social media is for — or what it can be for, if we use it to its fullest potential — is to create community. And there is nothing that will erode community faster, both online and off, than creating a society of mutual surveillance.

The level of delusion here is stunning. What community doesn't consist of mutual surveillance?

Here's a suggestion, what really is going on here is something else and you might call it fear of the global village. Villages are inherently more conservative than cities for the simple reason that it is harder to escape the surveillance of others. This plays out in weird ways. Joe who lives in a big city might, for example, go cruising for sex at night and write articles promoting traditional sexual morality by day. And he can do this confident that the "community" he hangs out with at night won't overlap much with the "community" of readers he has during the day. In a village the overlaps between groups are much wider and there is less moral anonymity as a consequence.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Neither I suspect. People have managed to live happy lives in both villages and cities and we'll adjust to what comes along. There will be some losses and some gains. But an elite made up of people who think that rioting and looting as something they can take in their stride but see citizen surveillance and a clear and present danger is something we can do without. And more and more of us are deciding these people are not worthy of our respect.