I found myself surprisingly upset yesterday when I realised that one of my favourite videobloggers – in fact, the only videoblogger whose videos I bothered to watch regularly – had suddenly taken all his clips off YouTube and disappeared into the ether.
It was the same feeling you might have if your favourite magazine suddenly goes under, or a top-notch comedy show fails to return for a long-awaited second season. I feel slightly bereft now that I'm not getting a daily insight into his admittedly mundane existence. And it was depressing to discover that he hadn't stopped blogging of his own accord; he'd effectively been forced off the internet by callous individuals intent on making his life a misery.
I'm loathe to give his name – seeing as he's shut up shop precisely because he wanted to avoid the glare of publicity – but he had achieved some kind of notoriety for for his incredibly downbeat recollections of his previous 24 hours, his regional weather reports, his take on the coming evening's television schedules and, most notably, his highly instructional video on how to make iced tea. Not groundbreaking, I admit, but curiously addictive to watch.
Despite being intensely private, he thought nothing of sharing his thoughts online. He deliberately steered away from self promotion, and the fact that the world was able to observe him chatting away seemed to him to be a slightly irritating side effect of the process of making videos. But then someone, or a group of people, decided that he looked like a "paedo", or a "rapist", and suddenly – so it seems – he was targetted in a campaign of online harrassment. When his family started to become involved, our videoblogger understandably decided to make himself scarce.
The New York Times recently published a long feature about "trolling" and online harrassment. It's a fascinating piece, despite the fact that it's impossible to feel any sympathy for any of the characters involved. Particularly when they decide to refer to their activities as as "experiments", or "sociological inquiries into human behaviour", rather than "bullying", or "making the lives of others distinctly unpleasant for no particular reason".
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Its enough to make you resist going online with anything these days.
Posted by: Recruitment Software | Saturday, 09 August 2008 at 05:23 PM
Sounds like the dulltard deserved it for not being intelligent.
Sheesh..!
Posted by: KissMe | Tuesday, 19 August 2008 at 11:31 PM
兵庫の養父のデリヘル情報が満載のデリヘル養父情報局です。
兵庫の豊岡のデリヘル情報が満載のデリヘル豊岡情報局です。
兵庫の香美のデリヘル情報が満載のデリヘル香美情報局です。
兵庫の新温泉町のデリヘル情報が満載のデリヘル新温泉町情報局です。
Posted by: yabu | Monday, 13 July 2009 at 10:01 AM