I wrote this blog about a year ago. So the dates could be a little bit off.
The first time I logged into the Internet I just turned 14 and I used a 28,8k modem. It was a whole new experience and there had been unlimited opportunities. So many people to meet, infinite information flow, and fucking lot of porn, though it took an eternity to download one picture. I do not know if it is true but rumors say that Chuck Norris invented the Internet to store his Porn collection1.
Nevertheless at this time, there was Internet or the so called Virtual Reality and Reality. I surfed the web, wrote some emails and wrote stupid comments on bulletin boards. Thats it, there had been no, or no significant influence in my life. It didn’t matter what I did on the Internet, the majority of people and friends around me wasn’t interested at all. I don’t know when and I don’t know how, but the interest of the people had changed significantly. They were suddenly talking about cyberspace, exchanged URLs and started to build their own websites. After a while, Google, Youtube, Facebook and other sites appeared in the consciousness of the people. Then World of Warcraft, flash-games and Ebay popped up. Trough those and other sites a second Reality had been shaped that did not deserve to be called Virtual reality anymore because the influence of it on our daily life is just too big. I will write about 3 examples of how the Internet and their Community influenced and interacted with the Real Life Environment. Though the 3rd is a little bit short because I didn’t had much time to finish this blog. Sorry for that.
Events
When we talk about the Internet, I actually mean the community and or sites that are related to humans, because we have not yet invented Skynet. Right at the moment Facebook with its 400 million users is maybe the biggest Community in the World but to be honest, the site itself is useful but not really exciting. But in terms of organizing a Flashmob or Events its exciting and influences not only the way of organization, but it also keeps the police and politicians busy, at last in France. There the Facebook Community uses FB for organizing so called apéro géant, which means massive aperitif, or to say it in other words, have some drinks with completely strangers in an open air environment. The phenomena emerged last November in the western city of Nantes where 9,000 people joined this event and it rapidly spread to other cities. 2 In the last few month there had been 60 of those events and the organizations try to outreach each other by the numbers of participants.3
The biggest Event according to the newspaper will be at the Eiffel-tower in Paris, where 15,000 people already signed up for this Group on Facebook.4 But I have to admit that I couldn’t find the Group so maybe it was canceled.
You can Organize one event with 15,000 People, just by starting a Group and inviting your friends. I think thats awesome! But there are also security issues coming from the local authorities and and politicians. They say that in Nante 40 people were arrested because of drunkenness, drug possession or rampage. 5
The Home Secretary, Brice Hortefeux, said that those events should not be forbidden, but that they have to be properly registered to the local authorities, so they can guarantee the safety of the people. 6
Media
It all started out with a prank on 4chan, a image-board site in the worldwide web. There they posted a Link that should have redirected you to a trailer of the new Game GTA IV, but instead they were looking at a music video from 1987 called „Never Gona Give You Up“ from Rick Astley, which you have just seen. That prank, known as Rockrolling, became a phenomenon, not just inside 4chan, but also to the „outside world“. It is said that over 25 million People clicked on the several music videos available on Youtube. 7
And according to an poll by SurveyUSA in April 2008, 18 million American adults got Rickrolled.8 Then in the same year the MTV Europe Music Awards started and surprisingly, this music video won in the category for the BEST ACT EVER . But not without the help of the Internet Community and 4chan. They abused the fact that MTV allowed several votes and placed a manual for an VOTING MACRO in the net. It is said that Rick Astley got 900 million Votes, which had been at least 100 times the total amount of all votes, cast in the 2007 EMAs.9
Another poll hack occurred in the annual TIME 100 POLL last year. In this pole the Users had to vote for the Person which has the biggest influence on this world. Due to this Pole, the most influential Person in the world is moot. Spelled moot, the founder of 4chan. He got nearly 17 million votes, which is nearly as much votes as the TOP 10 has together and by the way much more than Barack Obama, Ophra Winfrey and Wladimir Putin. But they did not just manipulated the Pole trough voting him to the top, no! If you look closely you can see that the first Letters of the TOP 21finalists spell out „Marblecake, also the game“. (There is no porn of the game. If it exists there is porn of it, no exceptions. Therefore, the Game does not exist. Also, the game/ Marble is the IRC channel Moot uses often) Which is an clear indication that this whole Pole was a fake.10
Demonstrations
Nevertheless those guys from 4chan must be really bored, because before they made a move at the Pole they started a campaign against The Church of Scientology. That was about 2 years ago and they did everything from DDoS distributed denial of service attacks against the servers of Scientology, made prank calls, send black faxes in order to disrupt the operation of the church.11 But they didn’t just stayed online, they organized several Demonstration in real life around the world. On February 10, 2008, about 7,000 people protested in at least 100 cities, worldwide. Within 24 hours of the first protest, a search for "Scientology" and "protest" on Google Blog Search returned more than 4,000 results and more than 2,000 pictures on the image-sharing site Flickr. There had been protests in Sydney, Toronto, London, Dublin, Dallas and New York. The Protests went on till November 2009. After that the situation cooled down.
In conclusion we can say, that the movement from Cyberspace towards and into the real life is getting bigger. I know that this article is not really scientific, but from my point of view and my experience this influence is much bigger than 15 years ago and is still getting bigger. The Internet is breaking down the barriers which stands between the Internet itself and the reality. And with the spreading of wireless LAN and other technologies which allow us to access the Internet from every possible point, those realities will became one. Not only can the Digital Community interact with the real world, they are shaping it like never before. There had been demonstrations, Media had been manipulated and influenced, and new ways of organizing things and people, are being discovered. Facebook can mobilize thousands of people, so can Twitter, as you have seen during the last years riots in Iran and also during the students protest in vienna last year.
3 http://www.stern.de/digital/online/phaenomen-apero-geant-frankreich-fuerchtet-facebook-saufgelage-1568265.html
