{"id":818,"date":"2009-04-07T20:26:32","date_gmt":"2009-04-07T19:26:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/?p=818"},"modified":"2010-01-28T22:31:47","modified_gmt":"2010-01-28T21:31:47","slug":"groupthink_and_blog_mobs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/2009\/04\/07\/groupthink_and_blog_mobs\/","title":{"rendered":"Groupthink and blog mobs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\nThe latest thing to engage the hearts and minds of bloggers is the plight of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jonengle.com\/2009\/04\/accused\/\">Jon Engle<\/a>, who says that a stock art site is accusing him of pirating his own work. The stock art site says he&rsquo;s copied their images, and Jon says it&rsquo;s the other way round.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nWhat&rsquo;s interesting about this story (which has made first page news on most blog aggregators out there) is not who&rsquo;s right and who&rsquo;s wrong. The interesting part is that 99% of the readers automatically assume that Jon is telling the truth, even though he doesn&rsquo;t offer any proof or examples of the pirated work. I counted; out of the 400 comments on his blog post I could find 3 or 4 that were not offering Jon their immediate support, swearing at the evil of corporate lawyers etc., without doing any research whatsoever. And among all the people digging, redditing, re-tweeting, re-blogging and otherwise spreading the story, I found <a href=\"http:\/\/brettlamb.com\/blamblog\/\">one sceptical blog post<\/a>, and one commenter actually doing some <a href=\"http:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/reddit.com\/comments\/8ac0q\/designer_gets_accused_of_stealing_his_own_work\/c08p5i7\">investigative work<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nWhere did this mob mentality come from? Is it because Jon is one of them (bloggers)? Or because it feels better to side with the small guy against big business? Whatever happened to critical thinking?\n<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>\n<i>Edited to add, on Wednesday:<\/i> Now there are <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thelogofactory.com.nyud.net:8080\/logo_blog\/index.php\/stock-logos-copyright-twitter\/\">responses<\/a> based on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thelogofactory.com.nyud.net:8080\/logo_blog\/stock.html\">actual<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.metafilter.com\/80654\/A-logos-worth\">facts<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The latest thing to engage the hearts and minds of bloggers is the plight of Jon Engle, who says that a stock art site is accusing him of pirating his own work. The stock art site says he&rsquo;s copied their images, and Jon says it&rsquo;s the other way round. What&rsquo;s interesting about this story (which [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[190,221,219,220],"class_list":["post-818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current_affairs","tag-blogging","tag-groupthink","tag-jon_engle","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=818"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/818\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1368,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/818\/revisions\/1368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}