Feb
15
The Downside of Open
Filed Under Technology
There’s been a bit of buzz recently about The Commons Flickr pool from the Library of Congress. The Library has posted some of its collection on Flickr so people can access part of the archives and also help in tagging the photos. I like this idea. Not only do we get to see some pretty amazing historical photographs, but this effort is a great example of what the web is good for.
Personally, I’ve been pretty blown away by these pictures. In particular, I find the 1930s-40s in Color collection astounding. I’ve seen plenty of Depression and WWII era photos before, but all in black and white. These images pop in color, the people moving from Historical Subject to Real People. Kind of makes it all hit home. These were all real people, and they look pretty much like we do now.
Anyone with a significant amount of digital photographs and an organizational preoccupation will know what kind of effort can be involved in organizing a collection can be. Imagine having millions of pictures. Imagine having millions of pictures that you didn’t take, of people you don’t know, of places you’ve never seen. How do you organize that? So the Library of Congress has outsourced the work to a group of digital photography enthusiasts. This is harnessing the collaborate nature of the current web in a manner we don’t see much, especially with government institutions. And Flickr users are, on the whole, a communal and friendly lot. Everyone wins.
However, some people are idiots.
Take a look at this picture. Or this one. What kind of person would leave insensitive and rude remarks on photos like these. It’s almost as if we need some oversight to block this kind of digital defacement–but that kind of goes against the spirit of the network, right?
Here’s the thing: We have all these new open communities on the web. People interact with one another in ways thought impossible just a few years ago. Especially young people. The freedom and lack of rules really foster this type of communication. But when the freedom is abused — as in making off these off color comments — it makes our entire society look ignorant. When you see a picture of a guy whose face is black with coal dust from working 12 hours in a mine with inadequate safety equipment, and then proceed to make a joke about the guy’s outfit, the entire group suffers. Suddenly, anyone using Flickr looks like a self-absorbed dolt with absolutely no sense of history.
Those of us on the web today are a pretty lucky bunch. On the whole, we have a lot of the things we want, get enough to eat, don’t lose sleep over bands of marauding raiders. But this wasn’t necessarily the case for people in these photos. This isn’t necessarily the case for a lot of people in the world today. We probably shouldn’t forget that.
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