How many times haven’t we worked all alone, together? I don’t know if the “alone, together” term is attributed to Sherry Turkle, but I know that it can apply to more things that we can imagine. For a collaborative paper that people write on Google docs without having never met, to Wikipedia and to online gaming in the form of MMORPG such as World of Warcraft (WoW). And isn’t voting a alone, together act since everyone votes individually? But, let’s leave the last out since it doesn’t include media yet.
My example combines online activism, online protest and crowdsourcing. It is the website of Ipaidabribe in India.
Corruption and bribe seems to be a huge problem in India and this is what the website wants to fight. To be more specific, ipaidabribe.com is a website which goal is to expose corruption and bribery in India. The website was created by Janagraha, a not-for-profit organization that wants to strengthen democracy in India. From its creation till today they have been 24268 reports of priberies in 631 cities. Out of these, 18617 were paid and only 747 of the reports are referring to honest officers. The citizens can choose to report whether they paid for a bribe, or they asked for a bribe which they didn’t pay or when they met an honest officer. As the statistics of the website are shown, the last case is very rare to happen, or maybe people don’ t feel the need to report when someone is honest, but they prefer to report only those who asked for bribes. Although the reports are anonymous and don’t name the officer who asked for bribery, the system reports the incident to media and government officials and thus it raises awareness of the fact.
Laida Limniati
Why I Heart My Media 