It Takes a Village to Find a Phone

This reading involved a situation in which a woman named Ivanna, lost her sidekick telephone in the back of a taxi cab. At the time Ivanna had been planning a wedding and much of her information such as her contacts were lost in the phone. This was valuable information for Ivanna and she turned to her friend Evan to help find the phone. Despite allready purchasing a new phone and having her information transferred, after discovering that the phone was being used by someone else, Evan and Ivanna decided to track down the person with the phone. When the alleged theif refused to cooperate and return the phone, Evan decided to turn to the internet and post a blog about the situation. The story spread like wildfire and soon enough nearly 1,000,000 people had been informed and involved in the situation. The mass amount of people was enough power to persuade the polices decision and eventually have the culprit arrested. In the end it happend to be just a 16 year old girl named Sasha who was neive and never thought that keeping a phone she had found in a cab could possibly lead to her arrest.

"Do we want a world in which a well-off grown-up can use this kind of leverage to get a teenager arrested, as well as named and shamed on a global platform, for what was a fairly trivial infraction?" Shirky asks this question on page 13 and really got me thinking. In my opinion using the internet to have the public involved and exploit Sasha was a great technique and yes it was very helpful. However I believe that it was unneccasary for a situation as small as the one at hand and put far more problems into the life of a 16 year old girl than needed. Yes, Sasha did not handle the situation in a proper fashion, however for her to be embarrased in front of thousands of people should never have taken place. I feel the public took the situation to far, and it should have been handled solely between Ivanna, Evan, and Sasha.

I found this to be an interesting article, as I myself recently found an Iphone on the ground when walking to my apartment. I contemplated keeping the phone, however I knew it would soon die of battery and I would not be able to use it as a phone anyway. I have lost my phone numerous times and for someone to return it would have meant alot to me. I than made the right decision and called the last person he had contacted and asked Where I could find the owner. His friend informed me of his address and I simply walked across the street and knocked on his door. This was something that I felt proudly about and hopefully karma will come my way soon. Most suprising about this article was the amount of people who became involved in this story and the extent that some strangers went to help out Ivanna. This is something I could see in the case of a larger scale theft or crime however for a lost phone I found the hole situation to be a bit out of hand.