8/6/2015

The Boston Manhunt and the Limited Wisdom of Crowd-Sourcing -- New York Magazine

Total Noise, Only Louder

#Manhunt.
By James Gleick

Published Apr 20, 2013

ids used to ask each other: If a

tree falls in a forest and no one

hears, does it make a sound? Now

theres a microphone in every tree and
a loudspeaker on every branch, not to
mention the video cameras, and weve
entered the condition that David
(Photo: Dan Lampariello/Reuters (Blast, Close-up); The Daily Free
Press/Kenshin Okubo/AP Images (Ripped Pants); John
Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images (Blood); John
Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images (Fallen Runner);
David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images (Blast, Pulled
Back))

Foster Wallace called Total Noise: the

tsunami of available fact, context, and
perspective.
This week was a watershed for Total

Noise. When terrible things happen, people naturally reach out for information,
which used to mean turning on the television. The rewards (and I use the word in its
Pavlovian sense) can be visceral and immediate, if you want to see more bombs
explode or towers fall, and plenty of us do. But others are learning not to do that.
The Boston bombings, shootings, car chase, and manhunt found the ecosystem of
information in a strange and unstable state: Twitter on the rise, cable TV in disarray,
Internet vigilantes bleeding into the FBIs staggeringly complex (and triumphant)
crash program of forensic video analysis. If there ever was a dividing line between
cyberspace and what we used to call the real world, it vanished last week.
Microblogging and social media intruded sharply upon the chain of events. The
@CambridgePolice, having tweeted SUSPICIOUS PACKAGE reports through
Thursday night and Friday morning, stopped tweeting in case the 19-year-old
fugitive Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was glued to his cell phone like everyone else
(monitoring police response via social media). And why wouldnt he be? The
Internet revealed his supposed Twitter name, which instantly acquired tens of
thousands of new followers.
Reddit users assembled a crowd-sourced map of the Thursday-night shootings and
carjacking. The @Boston_Police begged other tweeters to stop Broadcasting
Tactical Positions of Homes Being Searched. Someone instantly registered the
domain name shouldIlivetweetthescanner.info in order to post a short message:
NO. NO, NO and NO.
The slain MIT police officer, Sean Collier, was memorialized on an Officer Down
Memorial Page. The Chechen president, Ramzan Kadyrov, a.k.a. kadyrov_95,
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The Boston Manhunt and the Limited Wisdom of Crowd-Sourcing -- New York Magazine

turned to Instagram to announce that, whatever had happened, it was Americas

own fault. One of the more popular Twitter hashtags was #surreal. That would have
been useful for television news, too, if they had hashtags.
I managed to evade the television for several days after the bombing. You can get
your cable news secondhand, via Twitter or the blogs, which is a little like using a
mirror to avoid gazing upon the Gorgon directly. If you did that Wednesday
afternoon, you knew something was going on when William Gibson tweeted some
weather: Fog o news pea soup solid in Boston right now. Followed minutes later
by the London journalist Charlie Brooker: CNN is essentially just footage of
reporters in the street staring in bewilderment at their iPhones.
Fog of News was right. At 1:16 p.m., the reporter John King told the anchor Wolf
Blitzer that the police had identified a suspect. A dark-skinned male, he said, a bit
nervously, because of the sensitivities some people will take offense even at saying
that. Blitzer said, We cant say whether the person spoke with a foreign accent or
an American accent or anything like that, that would be premature.
At 1:45, Blitzer cut back to King for more information, exclusive reporting
namely, that an arrest had been made. A dramatic, dramatic shift, King said.
Meanwhile, and all along, background video loops: smoke and blood and people
running. Carnage recycled as eye candy.
I want to be precise, and I want to be sure we have it right, said Blitzer at 1:51. Its
important to get this information out there to the American public and important to
get this information out there in general, but its much more important to make sure
that were precise and accurate. King replied: An arrest has been made. Both Fran
[Townsend]s federal source and my Boston source say an arrest has been made.
None of this, of course, was true. No arrest had been made. No suspect had even
been identified. Nor was it important to get this information out there in general.
There was no information, and no one needed it.
But when everyone is monitoring everyone else, no one can bear to be left out. Fox
News, along with the Associated Press, the Boston Globe, and various local stations,
leaped in to report the nonexistent suspect in custody. They all cited unnamed
sources and later blamed the sources. The Keystone Koppish retreat lasted about an
hour. My favorite bit came on CNN at 2:30, from Fran Townsend, former Homeland
Security adviser to George W. Bush and now professional television contributor:
The situation is very fluid There was a misunderstanding, I mean, that was said
to me, not so much that we have misunderstood but that there has been a
misunderstanding and lots of cross-communications and understandably, as law
enforcement tries to work through this, what theyve got, who it is, what the purpose
of that is, and what the next steps are. So, I myself have had conflicting reports, and
I wanted just to be clear with you that they think thats a result of the chaos and the
quickly unfolding law-enforcement situation up in Boston.
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The Boston Manhunt and the Limited Wisdom of Crowd-Sourcing -- New York Magazine

Maybe its unfair to set down this kind of pressured utterance in print. But cable
news generates verbiage in this hollow mode, minute after minute, hour after hour,
when people are forced to speak even though they have nothing to say. Its inherent
in the enterprise. In most of what it does, continuous real-time broadcast news is a
failed experiment.
We need to get smarter about the vectors of time and information flow. We know
what the hurry is, of course. It is devoutly felt at CNN and Fox News that prestige or
viewership or both depend on being the first, even if only by seconds, to announce
practically anything. They continue to believe this, even though no one remembers
which of them was first to announce erroneously that the Supreme Court had
overturned the Affordable Care Actrushing to botch a fact that had been officially
released to the entire infosphere and would soon be universally available to
everyone. We gave our viewers the news as it happened, Fox said smugly later that
day.
It starts to feel as though were Pavlovs dogssubjects in a vast experiment in
operant conditioning. The craving for information leads to behaviors that are
alternately rewarded and punished. If instantaneity is what we want, television
cannot compete with cyberspace. Nor does the hive mind wait for officialdom. While
the FBI watched and tagged and coded thousands of images from surveillance
cameras and cell phones, users on Reddit and 4chan went to work, too, marking up
photos with yellow arrows and red circles: 1: ALONE 2: BROWN 3: Black backpack
4: Not watching.
Virtually everything these sleuths discovered was wrong. Their best customer was
the New York Post, which fronted a giant photo of two Bag Menwho, of course,
turned out to be a high-school kid and his friend, guilty of nothing but brown skin. If
the watchword Wednesday was crowdsource, by Thursday it was witchhunt. Total
Noise. But when the FBIs database of 12 million mug shots offered no help, what
could the authorities do but enlist the hive mind in the search?
Then, if you were really hooked, you joined the manhunt in cyberspace. Reporters
tweeted as they ran. @Boston_Police tweeted warnings and at least one license
plate. Cambridge residents tweeted the sound of sirens, the chatter on the police
scanner, and photos of bullet holes. Outsiders tweeted their love of crowd-sourcing
and their disdain for the old media.
A dozen officer going into our yard
@msnbc says brothers had bomb, @FoxNews says only a trigger @CNN is clueless

SWAT is out on Laurel St.

Boston Police to Twitter: Stop making up fake Twitter accounts, stop tweeting our
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The Boston Manhunt and the Limited Wisdom of Crowd-Sourcing -- New York Magazine

scanner, stop telling people where were going.

Were starting to sense what may happen when everything is seen and everyone is
connected. Bits of intelligence amid the din; and new forms of banality. Within
hours of his death, the world could examine the videos Tamerlan Tsarnaev watched
in his YouTube account and, on his Amazon wish list, some books he wanted.

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