Netflix's Making a Murderer shows the limits of web sleuthing

"As one poster on Reddit put it upon learning this Anonymous account: “Yes!!! Modern day justice!!!”

More damning praise might be difficult to find. The abusive Yelp comments, the request to punish “corrupt officials”, the naming-and-shaming of other potentially innocent people: this is not justice; it’s retribution.

Worse, it does nothing to fix any of the potential systemic problems highlighted by Avery’s case. Instead, the true, unstated aim of these recurring internet campaigns is to create a separate form of justice, a secondary system that appears more modern, more adaptive and more relevant to our lives than our usual one because it offers a false sense of closure – the kind we seek as TV viewers. It finds someone and it punishes them.

Despite the myth we perpetuate about the boundless supra-systemic solutions offered to us by the networked world, and the computers of which it consists, walls remain that can’t be dismantled with a workaround"

read the article by Colin Horgan >> 

Netflix's Making a Murderer shows the limits of web sleuthing | Television & radio | The Guardian