Cape Cod Technology Council Member Directory

This week’s tempest in a teapot involved YouTube, a poster named paddidda and the government of Thailand.

It seems that in Thailand, mocking or in any way defacing an image of 80-year old King Bhumibol Adulyadej or other members of the royal family isn’t exactly considered free political expression. It’s more like “do not pass GO, go directly to jail”. In March a Swiss man was indeed sent to jail for 10 years for defacing posters of the king – and that was reduced from the 75 years he was first given. The crime is call lese-majeste and the Thais mean business.

So here is YouTube, land of free expression – including dubious copyright use and lots of poor taste and adolescent-minded bad judgment, along with interesting experimental videos, clever commercial promotion, and pedantic town board meetings. It’s a real mix. It’s what you get when you remove the editor. It’s the good, the bad, the brilliant and the really banal.

Someone has been posting to YouTube a series of videos featuring the King and, shall we say, manipulating his image. The depiction ranges– depending on who describes it – from culturally insensitive, to insulting and mocking, to tasteless and immature. The videos did things like superimpose a pair of feet on the king's face, a deep cultural insult. No one has called these videos art or even intellectual political commentary. They seem poorly done and not really worth a second glance.

But no matter, Thailand is pissed off. Google declined to remove content from its YouTube service. The government blocked all access to YouTube. YouTube then removed it, but in short order another appeared. About 16,000 people viewed the offense before the government blocked access and Google removed the video the first time.

Is this that metaphorical tempest in a teapot or something more serious?

Thailand’s leaders aren’t alone in being on the receiving end of ridicule. Just ask George W! Or the government of Turkey, for that matter, which blocked YouTube earlier this year over what it considered offensive portrayal of one of its luminaries.

There are people enjoy mockery. And in a largely unregulated area of public communication they will inevitably appear. If mockery is a crime in Thailand, does that mean it is also a crime outside of Thailand? But, what about those people viewing it from within Thailand – because they saw it there, does the crime happen there?

And there is the issue of cultural sensitivity. Guess what, there are a lot of clods roaming free too. Some were offended that something that was so culturally inappropriate and insulting was allowed to be part of open discourse at all. Crime or no crime, some argued that simply allowing that kind of expression is a moral crime against use all.

The world is full of kooks. And within any community – real or virtual – they’ll show up too. Like, look at Tacoma this week. Someone posted a fake listing on Craigslist, the community-based online classifieds. It pointed people to a house owned by a woman named Laurie Raye and invited people to come and clear out the house. People did. It seems Laurie had recently evicted her tenants (some news reports say the tenants were also her sisters, giving the story and even more bizzaro twist).

Police were called when neighbors saw strangers hauling stuff out of the house, including apparently, windows and doors. Criagslist removed the ad. Honest, I can’t figure out who was the off base one – the poster of a faux ad that sort of read like a sarcastic joke or the people who read it, took it literally, and ransacked a house. I rather think the latter is a bit more scary.

Media literacy is a term that describes a set of skills that let you look at information and understand where it comes from and what bias it might include. It teaches people to be critical consumers, who can winnow out the good from the bad, the legit from the bogus, and the wheat from the chaff.

In a world of user-created content, these skills become even more necessary. If information is going to become a vast market commodity, then the market as a whole – that’s you and me and everyone around us – has to develop the judgment to reward the good and let the, well, less good sink to the bottom mud where the market decides it should lie.

In a perfect information ecology, videos of the Thai King with poorly rendered insults wouldn’t stir even a peep because it would be met the eye rolling and yawns that an adolescent whine should get. It would loll in the deep mud before you can say lese-majeste.

And our friends in Tacoma would have enough brains to read a call for ransacking and either laugh at its sarcasm or shake their heads and move on. It, too, would sink under its own weight.

Sometimes I think the greatest danger of user created content is that we all grow to take ourselves too seriously. From king to commoner, the world of user created content requires a strong sense of humor, a good BS-detector, and above all an ability to keep it all in balance.