Bully/anti-bully, Web 2.0-style

As the Village Voice describes HollaBackNYC.com - designed to empower New Yorkers to "holla back at street harassers" - it's grassroots surveillance. The site is a photo moblog, a blog to which people can upload pictures of a sexual or any other kind of harasser on the spot with their camera cellphones, and it can get pretty graphic, as is the Village Voice's coverage. But it's not much different from what can be found among the zillions of innocent profiles, blogs, photos, and videos on the social-networking and media-hosting sites. "There's a term in academia for the practice … University of Toronto engineering professor Steve Mann coined it to mean the opposite of surveillance. 'Sousveillance' is looking from below, turning the lens on the higher-ups, altering the power dynamic," the Village Voice reports. School administrators and law-enforcement people certainly know something about this. But what parents (and of course kids who upload photos, videos, etc.) need to think about is the privacy issue. Certainly some harassers deserve the spotlight they're getting. But the Village Voice cites the view of the Electronic Privacy Information Center that "sites like Holla Back may open a door to misuse or defamation." What they mean is, these sites can be used not only to "holla back" at bullies, but also to bully, defame, or threaten just about anybody, a terrible misuse of digital people power.