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Download Download “410 Gone” Infocide in Open Content Communities Joseph Reagle Northeastern University U.S.A. [email protected] Abstract Infocide, the purposeful retraction and deletion of an online identity, is accompanied by a confusing set of neologisms such as cybersuicide and information suicide. I distinguish and identify these variations as a form of cyberlanguage. I then explore the complexities of infocide in open content communities (e.g., Python, Wikipedia, Ruby, Debian and Ubuntu) with respect to reasons, enactment, and community reactions. I find that infocides are often prompted by the exhaustion of maintaining an online life, by discontent towards an online community, and over privacy concerns that one’s real and online identifies have intersected. While some infocide is concise and complete, infocide is occasionally graduated, such as when one removes aspects of one's identity including advanced status and capabilities (e.g., as an administrator). Because of the temptation to return to one's former identity, infocide is sometimes made irreversible, such as by changing one's account password to a random string. An equally interesting aspect of infocide is a community's reaction. I explore the responses of gratitude, sleuthing (attempting to identify more information, including motivation, about the exit), drama, and the preservation of contributions about the exit. Keywords infocide; online communities; open content; online ethnography. 1 In October 2011 Mark Pilgrim, a well-known and widely respected Web developer, committed infocide by removing his online presence and contributions. Pilgrim was one of the most visible and respected persons in his community: he authored the famous Dive into Python book followed by other “dive into” books on Web technology. These books, his popular blog and columns, and his software contributions, were online, freely available, and introduced many technologists to Python and Web development. Hence, Pilgrim’s disappearance and removal of his many contributions from the Web was widely felt. (So much so that it was commented upon in The Economist’s (2011) science and technology blog.) Some, no doubt, aspire to be as prolific, helpful, and respected as Pilgrim, but Mark turned away from his own sterling (but perhaps heavy) legacy by simply removing it. And while his removal was total, it was also concise. One might receive any number of responses to a request for a Webpage that are typified by numeric codes such as 200 OK (accompanied by the Webpage) or 404 Not Found (and one sees an error message). When the community attempted to understand what had happened to Pilgrim, they had little more than the server’s terse response: 410 Gone. The Web’s protocol specification states this means the resource is gone and will not be returning: it notifies “the recipient that the resource is intentionally unavailable and that the server owners desire that remote links to that resource be removed” (Fielding et al., 1999). In this essay I explore the phenomenon of infocide through Mark Pilgrim's example and others. I show that while infocide has recently come to the fore of popular attention, the practice has existed online for decades. However, infocide’s present visibility is accompanied by a confusing set of neologisms; these terms – cybersuicide, information suicide, wiki mind wipe, etc. – are distinguished and identified as a form of cyberlanguage (Gibbs, 2006, p. 30). I then explore the complexities of infocide in open content communities with respect to reasons, enactment, and community reactions. I find that infocides are often prompted by the exhaustion of maintaining an online life, by discontent towards an online community, and over privacy concerns that one’s real and online identifies have intersected. I also explore the responses of gratitude, sleuthing (attempting to identify more information, including motivation), drama, and preservation. 2 Background and Terminology In attempting to understand infocide one is confronted with what Donna Gibbs calls cyberlanguage, “a new language, with its own brand of quirky logic, which evolves with unprecedented speed and variety and is heavily dependent on ingenuity and humor” (Gibbs, 2006, p. 30). For example, one aspect of this logic is to borrow and adapt “real world” idioms, such as using “internet suicide” to refer to alienating behavior: “Man, you can’t go around posting the f-word everywhere, that’s internet suicide!”1 Consequently, to understand this phenomenon we require a bit of lexicography. Two sources most useful for understanding online culture (and its language) are Urban Dictionary and Encyclopedia Dramatica -- two of the most historied and popular sites for documenting online and popular culture. Urban Dictionary, launched in 1999, is a repository for (over 6 million) definitions of contemporary popular culture, slang, and internet memes (Urban Dictionary, 2012). Submissions, which include a definition and optional examples of usage, can be made by anyone providing an email address; other contributors then vote upon whether a definition ought to be accepted. One word can have multiple definitions; the term “Urban Dictionary” entry itself has nearly 400 at the time of writing (Urban Dictionary, 2012). Encyclopedia Dramatica, launched in 2004, can be thought of as Wikipedia’s doppelganger: an online collaborative encyclopedia focusing on the humorous, snarky, and often cruel side of internet culture. Like Wikipedia, users can edit pages and these edits persist or are reverted by other contributors. These online sources, and others, provide a means of distinguishing related phenomena. Online suicide, cybercide, and infocide Ending one’s online presence and purposefully ending one’s life are not the same thing, though both have varied, and sometimes overlapping, behaviors and neologisms. Suicides enacted online garnered some popular attention with the reporting 1 Posted in http://www.urbandictionary.com as an example of the use of the expression by Yet Another Cool Dude, 2009. 3 of online suicide pacts in Japan in 2000 and 2003 (Ueno, 2000). A search of English- language journal articles reveals that the availability of materials and support for suicide became salient to mental health scholars in the late 90s, as seen in Suicide on the Internet: a Focus for Nursing Intervention? (Baume, Rolfe, & Clinton, 1998), Cybersuicide: the Internet and Suicide (Alao, Yolles, & Armenta, 1999), and other publications (Dobson, 1999, Thompson, 1999). Reports of online suicide, such as a woman killing herself by inhaling poisonous fumes while describing the process on Facebook, continue to today (Associated Press, 2012). Yet this is not the focus of this paper. Even when one puts aside mediated or facilitated death, other neologisms speak of (a) an attention seeking exit from a community, (b) getting oneself banned (intentionally or not), and (c) and the purposeful retraction of one’s presence and contributions from the internet. Attention seeking behavior is central to the Urban Dictionary’s first definition of internet suicide: “When someone in a forum, newsgroup, etc. says they are leaving (sometimes ‘and never coming back’), but actually wants to see how people react to their leaving. Usually as the result of drama”2. However, this dramatic aspect is more precisely identified as a flounce at Encyclopedia Dramatica: A flounce post is when one must proclaim that they are leaving a community forever. These attention whores are nearly as amusing as those who use “deleting your LiveJournal” for attention. Rather than quietly leaving an LJ community, they feel they must leave a long ass, boring, nonsensical post explaining why they are so much more highly evolved than anyone else in the community. (Encyclopedia Dramatica, 2011) Neither of these definitions speaks of removing one’s contributions, but this is captured in Urban Dictionary’s definitions of infocide and digital suicide: infosuicide/infocide: Disengaging from the internet via the deletion of all 3 your publicly available information . 2 Posted in http://www.urbandictionary.com by Shawnyshawn, 2007. 3 Posted in http://www.urbandictionary.com by quadhome, 2011. 4 digital suicide: Deleting all or most of your information from the internet namely social networking sites such as your facebook, twitter, xanga accounts…. “[For example, Frederick] committed digital suicide when he applied for a new job”. 4 Given the promiscuity of cyberlanguage, infocide has also been adapted to site- specific variations such as Twittercide5, removing one's twitter account, and Facebook kevorkian6, a person who helps another commit “Facebook suicide” by deleting an account and related information. Wikicide is the neologism in the collaborative wiki space (Encyclopedia Dramatica, 2006) wherein exit is characterized as a “Right to Leave” but the excision of one person’s contributions has been likened to a “Wiki Mind Wipe” (Meatball, 2012). Finally, one term not captured in these recent sources is "scribble". This was a feature of The WELL, a seminal messaging forum from the late 80s and early 90s in which a user could easily remove their postings; in one infamous incident it preceded a member’s suicide (Hafner, 2001; Rheingold, 2000, p. 21; Turner, 2006, p. 145). Hence, the practice of infocide has been around since the early years of online community; its present noteworthiness is simply a reflection of the Net’s pervasiveness today. In any case, I use the term exit to speak of leaving a community and infocide as the further removal of one’s presence and contributions. Any of these behaviors might be considered a flounce if done in a particularly dramatic and inflaming manner. Method This analysis is based upon a naturalistic inquiry (Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Thomas & Jones, 2006) into exit and infocide from Web communities. I focus on the communities that are characterized by openness, voluntary contribution, and the production of free cultural products (Reagle, 2004). That is, as a researcher, user, and peripheral participant of Linux, Ubuntu, Debian, KDE, Python, Web development, and 4 Posted in http://www.urbandictionary.com by shitastic, 2010.
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