Little Brother’s Watching You
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Corporations and Government organizations have been watching/tracking our movements for ages now. What happens when “Little Brother” is the one doing the analyzing?
That’s exactly what is happening thanks to Virgil Griffith, a CalTech grad student. Virgil has developed a means of tracking changes made on Wikipedia. The program, Wikipedia Scanner, lifts the “fingerprints” left behind when someone anonymous makes a change on Wikipedia. The recent article “See Who’s Editing Wikipedia – Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign” from Wired goes more in depth.
Wikipedia has been known as a useful tool for marketers creating an ARG and other types of interactive campaigns, but these are generally meant for entertainment and community connectivity. A publicly influencial entity hiding its skeletons, however, can mean great damage to our future, environment, health, etc…
Wikipedia is a living digital organism developed, created, and edited by those in love with quality information and the right to view it freely. That’s how I see it anyway. This being understood, Wikipedians usually are quick to right the wrongs made in poor editing. The bottom line now comes down to who is held accountable? The individual making the changes or larger entity supposedly responsible for said individual?
Winston Churchill once said, “History is written by the victors.” Well, this is one-step-of-many for us users in the fight for corporate and government accountability. May the Wikipedians power of influence never die.
Frenzied Waters, Campfire’s big summer campaign for Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, was a huge success. Bloggers, radio personalities and the general public hunted for mysterious “Shark Attack” capsules, capsules that contained the artifacts of oceanic tragedies. Some from times past, some that hit closer to home than anyone could have imagined.
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