The melancholic nature of the article and the easy going attitude of the author really made the article different and original for me. I really liked reading an

The melancholic nature of the article and the easy going attitude of the author really made the article different and original for me. I really liked reading and thinking about the points raised in it. But really, all it was, was revealing the one obvious aspect of human nature: how we react to objects. Here its a computer. When someone had your password, it’s not just that they could access any information, but that they could become you. When people send you an email, there is an expectation of privacy. But most of the emails were from reporters and journalists. I wrote a form response and started replying to everyone, letting them know the EFF had encouraged me not to talk about it. This was a really difficult moment. I felt like everything was arranged in a way to keep discussion limited, to keep people working against each other instead of working together. Hundreds and hundreds of comments, on dozens of major blogs. I’m no stranger to publicity, but this was on a completely different scale. Everyone had an opinion and wanted to argue with each other. Yet I had to remain completely silent. The above quotes when left to ponder are really profound. Pointing the easy to notice things are indeed the easy to ignore. In the other comments, I started to notice a trend: people were trying to establish definitions. They were arguing about ethics and ontology (even though no one called it that). The project hit a nerve that made people uncomfortable enough that they had to share their opinions and argue their positions. If you’re at school studying art, philosophy, or politics, this isn’t a big deal. These discussions happen over lunch, or in the hallways. But this was happening on the internet. Everything and anything happens on the internet, and if there is no identity attached to the actions, the truer they become of the person, than in real life where people are bound to act by social commonsense. With “People Staring at Computers,” I saw something new: a massive audience engaged in a collective decision-making about the culture they wanted to adopt, in realtime, via comment threads strewn across blog posts and news articles Its not new. It started right when internet started. If some other way to mass communicate was possible before, it would have started then as well.