Beware Social Media's Dark Side

Chronicle of Higher Ed 2011-dark side.Young, J. R. (2011, March 20). Beware Social Media's Dark Side, Scholars Warn Companies: Technology festival features academic gadflies, Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/article/Beware-Social-Medias/126813/


Author points out some different opinions of people at SxSW, South by SouthWest Interactive conference,  on crowdsourcing and racism. 
crowdsourcing: act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to an undefined, large group of people or community (a "crowd"), through an open call.


Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, concerns about   crowdsourcing, arguing that it is like the Turk, a man inside the box playing chess. The Turk gave Amazon the name for Mechanical Turk who does Human Intellingence Tasks (HIT) for requestors.Zittrain claims that they are similar, crowdsourcing  and the man inside a box in the sense that it is not worker-friendly and that the groups usually are not being payed good - they are only sweating for nothing. He only refers to these groups in crowdsourcing as "poor people".


On the other hand, Biewald, head of a crowdsourcing company denies Zittrain's idea about crowdsourcing being a sweatshop, and points out that it is actually voluntary.


Lisa Nakamura, a professor of Asian-American studies at the University of Illinois discussed the racism in video games. She gave an example of how Chinese kids are playing video game Lineage II for US people for money and they have chosen a female dwarf as their character.  Then US players started killing this female character while making racist comments about Chinese. She also pointed out the craigslist racism that is when product is held by a black hand in the picture, it is price goes down.