Here Comes Everybody Chapter 1

I am somewhat troubled by the racial aspects of the missing phone anecdote.  Would the phone story have gotten as much attention online if the "villain" wasn't Latino?  Could Evan's actions be interpreted as those of an online vigilante?  Could the story be seen as an example of someone with more money and status, using their resources to beat up a person with less money and status?  The internet is not a level playing field.  It takes some disposable income to get online regularly.  When someone is the victim of a crime, they tend to want a severe penalty for the perpetrator, even if the crime was minor.  Was prompting online vitriol and people driving by the teenager's house an example of that?

A New York Times article does not really take the girl's side, but it does at least include comments from Sasha's mother.

This part on Page 21, referring to social media, seems important:

By making it easier for groups to self-assemble and for individuals to contribute to group effort without requiring formal management (and its attendant overhead), these tools have radically altered the old limits on the size sophistication, and scope of unsupervised effort (the limits that created the institutional dilema in the first place).

...Therefore allowing things like Wikipedia, or the whole idea of wikis (pieces of text that can be edited by anyone), which is one of the two really new, paradigm changing ideas that we have discussed in this class.  (The other is Google's discovery of a new forum for advertising:  Acting as a go-between to bring together advertisers, and bloggers who individually will never have enough readers to support a sales person.)