The article “How to find a village phone”, by Clay Shirky is about a young woman named Ivanna who leaves her phone full of wedding planning information in a taxi cab in New York. The phone is picked up by 16 year old Sasha, and the article follows and explains the process Ivanna and her friend Evan take to get the phone back. In the beginning, Evan begins emailing with Sasha and asking her politely for her to return the phone, as it is important for his friend’s wedding, but the young girl is increasingly disrespectful about the situation, even going so far as to bring race into the matter, and also have her boyfriend threaten violence on Evan. As it becomes clear the phone won’t be returned this way, Evan makes a website to document to other people the situation, and as the website becomes more popular and gains more viewers, the police get involved and eventually arrest Sasha and the phone is returned to its rightful owner. Before the story gained national attention, and the attention of several popular news outlets, the police had classified the phone as a “lost item”, instead of a stolen item. But once they began to be pressured by the thousands of people that had taken Evan and Ivanna’s side, they then caved, and officially classified the phone as a “stolen item”, which is what eventually led to Sasha’s arrest, and the returnal of the stolen property. This shows an unfortunate trend, because if the story had not gained national attention, and the police had not been pressured to change the official classification of the phone, justice would most likely not have been served. The quest to get the phone returned also is more than financial for Evan. As the article states, “After all, the phone was expensive, but it wasn’t that expensive, and it’s not like $300 would buy Evan a lot of help.” The bottom line here is that if he only cared about the financial side, he could’ve just spent $300 on a new phone for Ivanna, but it was more personal because of the wedding information that was stored on the phone.
Although what Sasha did was wrong, and Evan is technically right here, it is still problematic that Sasha was basically shamed on a global scale for something as trivial as taking someone else’s phone from a taxi cab. The crime wasn’t premeditated in any way, which adds to this degree of how problematic it is. We shouldn’t strive to live in a world where someone can publicly shame a teenager for an honest mistake. With the evolution of technology, it has become easier than ever to put these kinds of trivial cases into the media and split people into factions based on who they believe is right and who they believe is wrong. It can create an outlet for arguing with thousands of people over the internet. This whole thought actually wraps up into the title of the article, “It takes a village to find a phone.” Without the use of online media, the phone would most likely not have been returned, but it came at the cost of Sasha’s embarrassment and public shaming. It shows these media outlets have both positive and negative outcomes.
Video comparisons:
The video “Why participate?” (https://player.vimeo.com/video/13428582) poses asks the following question: even though people have a virtually infinite amount of things they can choose to do on their phones at any given time, why do they stick with the same few dozen? The answer to me is because people are naturally afraid of change, and like to stick with what they are comfortable with. It also touches on the importance we as people see in sharing stories with eachother, which is why when eating we focus on talking and sharing stories with eachother, and not simply just eating. The “Transmedia” video (https://youtu.be/Nk3pahtpsVY?si=vy90-tGy8agUpmIG) also explains how with the new evolution of media, we are now able to share stories with much more people easier than ever before. This is the entire reason why the Village Phone article was even able to happen. It was because of the new evolution of media that allowed Evan’s story to reach a record amount of people in record time. Groups can now put knowledge together in a more complex way than ever, as Jenkins puts it. The final video, is a short interview with Henry Jenkins (https://youtu.be/SGVfJVde164?si=cz111Y0tPuzij0So). In it, he explains the idea of collective intelligence, meaning we as a society share information with each other because it is impossible for one person to know everything. Everybody knows something, but nobody knows everything, and as technology is developing, sharing that information is becoming easier and easier.
A video that I was able to find that is similar to these two videos is:
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