I’m genuinely trying to figure out what all of these reports, that seem to be clambering over one another to say something topical and fashionable at the same time, are getting at.

The topical bit (I’ll hop on the bandwagon here) is the Boston bombers. Or #manhunt. Or whatever you want to call it; the important bit is that your article get written and published before the second one gets shot or shoots himself.

The fashionable bit is to talk about the internet as if it is some sort of relatively unregulated network of half-wits who will sharpen their pitchforks and point their sticky fingers at their computer screens at the drop of a (white/black) hat.

The ‘hivemind’ and Reddit have got a lot of criticism in most of these reports. This is partly because because from the limited information and media that people had available to them, they audaciously decided to infer things that turned out not to be true…

“What!?” I hear you gasp. Yes, that’s right- photos of the mangled pressure cooker and the bag in which it was kept became available as well as a huge number of photos and videos from the event in the minutes leading up to the explosion. With these bits of information, no desire to actually to go to Boston to join in with the efforts and nothing better to do with their time, these fucking amateurs wasted our time by wasting their time thinking that they were going to (collectively) single-handedly figure out who these evil doers were.

Unfortunately, as we haven’t, for now, got a better name for hivemind than hivemind, we are doomed to comparing internet dwellers to bees. Whilst analogous in some respects (bees also produce surplus amounts of sticky substances), the comparison begins to breakdown when we realise that there is no preprogrammed goal of the internet-based hivemind. There is no queen to protect, there is no colony to preserve. (Except possibly now, in the aftermath, when the question of internet censorship will inevitably pop up again).

If pushed to imagine a possible single goal of the hivemind or community in question, I would say that it is to entertain all members of the group. I am using this term broadly and there are of course other ’emotional’ factors involved, but I don’t think anyone would partake in this terrible act of accidentally naming innocent people unless they were entertained, not by falsely accusing innocent people, but by the process itself.

Now, of course many were trying to be ‘heroes’, they were trying to beat the FBI to finding the suspects. Others were content with the rolling feeds of raw information provided by users with access to police scanners who were in turn entertained themselves purely by this act of service to the community/swarm/locusts.

So, just like the bees, each member finds their niche interest/skill. However, the perceived goal of the hivemind the multiple articles I have read are inferring to, which was to find the bombers, is somewhat skewed. To see a large collection of people in a single ‘place’ as a single entity is as foolish as imagining that every protester at a peace rally has exactly the same reasons for being there as the next. To imagine such a thing is naive but to represent the group as a whole as trouble makers when a only a small faction decide to start throwing bottles is downright disingenuous.

Of course there are people that think that throwing a bottle will get more attention and thus coverage etc. but they, in my opinion, are mislead and probably in a minority even within the short-lived bottle throwing community. In the same respect, there are people online who will happily post the personal information of people who they do not know, that they have managed to glean from somewhere on the internet, for fun (the lulz) or just simply because they don’t know any better. They are active participants and free agents so we must rely on others to keep the peace.

Ordinarily, on sites like Reddit (less so in the mainstream broadcast media), this personal information is promptly deleted because it is a breach of the ‘rules’ and because it is almost always mean spirited or seriously unsubstantiated; a certain amount of self-regulation is, or at least should be, in place to stop these things from getting out of hand. On this occasion however, the ‘information’ and wild (and sometimes not so wild) speculation was instrumental to the furthering of the ‘investigation’ that was so central to the entertainment the ‘hivemind’ was craving for. As a result of this warped regulation, people were offended and the innocent ‘accused’ of being guilty. Their pictures were everywhere – I’ve never seen that kind of thing happen on the telly before, it’s almost as if consumer demand plays a factor in what we see!

On the flipside, and this is important, there are other people, often overlooked, who demand sources for outlandish statements and attempt to steer the conversation within the ‘hive’ toward a productive outcome rather than an entertaining one. There are skeptical people like this everywhere in the world but they are rarely listened to outside of organised institutions/businesses because the din of the mob demanding entertainment is so much louder (and entertainingly destructive) that it become a singular impression that can easily be reported on. The few who are productive are necessarily part of the hive- the information provided by thousands of users is essential to their ‘work’ but they, like everyone else have their own objectives/methodology.

To summarise:

The aim of this terrible online ‘investigation’, if any at all, was to entertain and inform, not to sting. This hivemind was a collection of independent thinkers, some of whom thought it would be fun to race the FBI to finding the culprits, many of whom to watch both ‘investigations’ take place alongside countless other bits of information thrown their way, and some of whom to skeptically request sources when they deemed it appropriate.

This online investigation did not work in the sense that the real bombers were not identified and apparently went horribly wrong in the sense that they pointed the finger at the wrong people which upset a family. That’s it. No, really, that’s it.

Because of the quasi-immediate, internet-age speed of (mis)information distribution, things got a bit out of hand, like they always do. The people to blame are the people who spread the information unquestioningly; if the news channels decide to run with a story found online, they should understand exactly what has pushed this information to the surface. ‘Retweeting’ and ‘upvoting’ anonymously are a necessary by-product of the way in which things operate around here.

Last time I checked it looks like the internet just got something wrong and somebody got scared and fearful because they were a ‘suspect’. I don’t think one of the tech-savvy basement-dwellers would have actually leapt out at the suspect from behind a bush, brandishing a lightsaber rather than, oh I don’t know, calling the police and letting them deal with it. If that’s wasting police time then it’s a very distilled version of it. If upsetting the family of a missing kid isn’t somewhat justifiable collateral damage then I might have to refer you to other cases of collateral damage. Innocent until proven guilty: yes. Wearing a big backpack where the bomb went off: a bit suspicious; let’s see what else we can find.

If people stop doing this kind of adrenaline-driven, crowd-sourced, pseudo-productive finger-pointing thing, that can go so terribly wrong we are told, then I think we are losing something that is potentially very useful. That’s it. Potentially useful: more good than harm in the long run.

Firstly, let’s not forget that even entertainment has collateral damage (celebrities with ruined lives, bruised contestants on Takeshi’s Castle etc.) and in this case there was a distinct (albeit remote – how remote we’ll probably never know) possibility that some good could have come of this online ‘investigation’. It wasn’t even that bad; the way it’s being reported on would (probably) be very different had they actually found something of note (or at least been given credit for it). Let’s not forget how the power of the internet and crowd-sourcing is often praised in other contexts (SETI, One Billion Minds etc).

Secondly, I am pretty sure that because of the entertainment factor involved here, if the punters that were near the event didn’t think they would ‘get anything out’ of uploading their photos to the web (other than helping the police track down the the criminals, of course), I’m not convinced they would have done it. Brand me a cynic but the amount of photos of the event that the police must have harvested from social media and online discussion surely, in my opinion, outweighs the information that was uploaded directly to their sites (from the public, at least).

Maybe this is all just a long argument for online censorship and more CCTV cameras but I’d like to think otherwise. When the online world of forum based or social media infotainment (information meets entertainment) meets the ‘actual’ rolling news, which frequently also fall under this neologism, they just love to fight. It’s like watching identical twins, who both think that they themselves are beautiful, being ruthlessly critical of the other. It’s almost as if people don’t know that mirrors are just thinly coated pieces of glass.

Take away message: we’re all doomed so be nice.

I would like to apologise for the rambling nature of the paragraphs you may have just waded through and their failure to address many of the relevant/real issues – I didn’t want to go on for too long. I would however, like to think that the piece is neither completely vapid nor entirely vacuous. I would also like to apologise for poor use of punctuation, lack of references and all round bad use of English; this was a bit of a trial piece/rant and written an an ungodly hour. You have only myself to blame. Feel free to comment with constructive criticism/abuse.