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stolen goods and the power of the internet

Like the good folks over at the Independent, I too have recently been reading Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, a collection of arguments and vignettes on the power of the Internet. The salient point that the Indy picked up on is how, by abolishing the high costs of printing, publishing, and distributing information, the Internet is forcing The Newspaper to reassess its traditional role as the weekly standard for a community.

A few weeks ago, I ran into Lenore Ramm of Eclectic Glob of Tangential Verbosity at the DPAC Blogger Bash. She told me of a friend who’s bike had been stolen and how, in an effort to retrieve the bike, the friend created a website. While stories of using blogs and monitoring eBay and Craigslist to recover stolen goods have become almost commonplace, take a second to think about what this means for just how pervasive the Internet has become to our conception of community.

Just two examples to focus my point:

• Neighborhood listservs are now among the most reliable sources of hyperlocal news. Warnings about loose dogs on the streets, plants to give away, yard sales announced, café music benefit show funds raised, even homes sold — no topic is off-topic as long as it happens in the neighborhood. When friends ask about finding housing in my neighborhood, I refer them to the listserv and encourage them to join.
• There are also a growing number of cities with local blogs that cover on-the-ground civic reporting with as much reliability and insight as the municipal papers. Bull City Rising and Church Hill People’s News (Richmond, VA) come to mind.

And while there have always been start-up attempts at taking a cut from the local publishing market, Shirky’s point is that never has it been so easy to obtain the means of publication. Until the advent of the Internet, publishing an independent organ for the sole purpose of recovering a $700 bicycle just would not have been possible.

So, on March 21st, a bike was stolen in Old West Durham, and now the whole world can know about it. Any computer attached to the Internet can browse to http://findmybicycle.blogspot.com/, learn how to spot the features that make the victim’s bike unique, and get in touch with the owner. “I’m hoping that we demonstrate the power of social media!,” says the website’s creator.

So world, although it may add some perverse pleasure to your life to know that bike thieves spend eternity in a special circle of hell for their miscreant deeds, the owner of a silver Trek 7500 FX will find more pleasure if she gets her bike back. Even more still if a community helps her find it.

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