The Death of Nikki Catsouras and the Ugly Underbelly of the Web
Nikki Catsouras and her tragic death in her father's Porsche have shown us a more sinister side to the web. Although news organisations have generally been sensitive and offered limited coverage of this story (a search on Google news for "Nikki Catsouras" at the time of writing brings up very few results), the web was awash with searches and references to Nikki, or "Porsche girl" as she has become known. Her name and related searches remained at the top 100 searches for longer than most other key searches on Google Trends.
Nikki Catsouras was an 18-year-old college student from California, living at home with her parents and two sisters. On Halloween of 2006 she had an argument with her parents, after which she took off with the keys to her father's Porsche, which she borrowed without permission.
Catsouras was driving the Porsche at one-hundred miles an hour, when she lost control of the car. According to reports, she was trying to overtake a Honda which was cruising at a much lower speed when her father’s Porsche slammed into a cement tollbooth at intense speed. The impact was so violent that Catsouras was killed instantly, her body crushed and mutilated.
The story would have been tragic in its own right, but nothing prepared her family for what was to follow.
According to media reports, when California Highway Patrol officers investigators arrived on the scene they took detailed photographs of the crash and Catsouras' badly mutilated body, presumably for the purpose of the investigation. Those gory and very disturbing images somehow found their way onto the Internet and within days became so prevalent that thousands of sites carried them. ABC picked up on the story and ran in on its 20/20 programme, which added to the interest in Catsouras' death.
Once Nikki Catsouras' pictures were on the Net, there was no way to completely eliminate them. And the reason? The huge demand. Because so many web users were looking for Nikki's images, site owners repeatedly posted them to supply this demand for images of death. Some did so to gain traffic, while others were simply happy to feed the frenzy.
Another effect of this story was an increased interest in death websites in general. An analysis of searches, in the week that followed the release of Catsouras' pictures, shows a massive rise in related web queries. According to Google Trends the terms fatal car accidents, death photos, faces of death, and world of death were all within the top 100 searches - the latter two are sites dedicated to images of death.
The Catsouras family has since filed a lawsuit against the California Highway Patrol for allegedly releasing the accident scene pictures, and a judge in California ruled that the lawsuit against the California Highway Patrol could go forward. At the time of writing, proceedings were ongoing.
On reflection, it is sobering that many sites simply referred to Nikki Catsouras as "Porsche Girl", a dehumanising term that made her into an item, rather than a person. She became a commodity, and the demand for the macabre images of her death will forever remain at large.
It shows us that the underbelly of human nature and its curiosity for things that are taboo is stronger than any moral or ethical code. I am not sure what can be done to make it better and I am a great advocate of freedom of expression. However, in this case I feel strongly that of dignity of a young girl and of her family should somehow be protected, and that freedom of expression does not mean a free-for-all, forsaking any shred of humanity and kindness to others.
It is worth noting that there is a fundamental difference between the legal frameworks that govern these sorts of cases in the US and those in force in the UK. In the US, publishers of gore imagery could claim the First Amendment - protecting their right for freedom of speech. In the UK, however, there is no equivalent to the First Amendment, and Nikki Catsouras' accident images may well fall under the Obscene Publications Act 1959 & 1964. Of course this is utterly theoretical at the point where imagery finds itself onto the web at large.
Nikki Catsouras - The Video report from 20/20:
suriphobia – fear of mice. If you have it you are a suriphobe (why on earth do people in Washington want to know that?)
Suriphobe - someone suffering from Suriphobia.
Suriphobia - Fear of mice and rats is one of the most common specific phobias. It is sometimes referred to as musophobia (from Latin mus for "mouse") or murophobia (a coinage from the taxonomic adjective "murine" for the Muridae family that encompasses mice and rats). Suriphobia, from the French souris, meaning mouse. (Wikipedia)
And Suriphobia does not , of course, refer to fear of Suri Cruise - daughter of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes.
Suriphobe and Suriphobia have been in the top searched for terms on the Internet today. If you are from Washington or Arlington (where most of those searches came from), could you please leave a comment here and explain yourself? I will update as and when I learn more.
Oh dear, Google Trends #1 Hot Search today is “what to do if inside of girl gets wet”
Apologies in advance for this post. It is presented here for scientific reasons only...
And I kid you not. Here is the screenshot:
There seem to have been some problems with Google Trends over the last 24 hours with the content not updating for a while, and then this one rose to the top, circumventing any sanitation filters.
According to the Google Trends "About" page:
"Hot Trends reflects what people are searching for on Google today. Rather than showing the most popular searches overall, which would always be generic terms like "weather," Hot Trends highlights searches that have sudden surges in popularity. Our algorithm analyzes millions of web searches performed on Google and displays those searches that deviate the most from their historic traffic pattern. The algorithm also filters out spam and removes inappropriate material." (The emphasis on the last bit is mine-DD).
You may wonder how this all came about, and like a lot of things it started, innocently enough, when someone who was obviously in the midst of a barbeque, ran the following search: "what to do if inside of GRILL gets wet." Google offered an alternative search, replacing "grill" with "girl":
The guy obviously thought it all hilarious, and hurried to post it on Reddit, where it made the front page. The rest, as they say, is history...
To be fair to Google Trends, the terms "wet" and "girl" do not necessarily stand out as filth on their own. But it is still late afternoon in California, and you would have thought someone would notice. And while we're on the subject, the copyright issue at the bottom of the page is a bit out of date, and still reads "2007".
Update: I dropped Google Trends an email at 22.57 UK time, and within ten minutes I got a thank you back, and they removed the entry. I also noted to them the wrong copyright date. I should get a Google award, or something.
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Mozilla brand is strong! Mozilo’s PR is whoops! (Did I really click “Reply All”?)
If you got here through a search engine in the past few hours, you are very likely to have typed "Realty Check: Who sparked Countrywide CEO Mozilla’s “disgusting” e-mail reply?"
Yep, this is one of those geeky entries, but it does suggest that search is a great reflection of social trends. Here's how:
When The Financial Chairman of US lender Countrywide, Angelo Mozilo, ignited an online furore in the US on Tuesday by describing a mortgage customer's plea for help as a "disgusting" example of form letters inundating his company, one unexpected effect was a testament to the growing popularity of the Mozilla brand, home to the Firefox browser.
Instead of searching for Mozilo, most US Google searches on this topic included the terms "ceo mozilla disgusting email".
This may be an indication of the growing popularity of the Firefox browser as an alternative to Internet Explorer, and it is clear that brand recognition of Mozilla, even if passive, is fairly high. This effect is obviously not assisted by the spell checker on Microsoft applications suggesting Mozilla for Mozilo, every time...
Good for Mozilla, I say. Maybe also good for Mozilo (they found a browser instead of him).
Geeky entry ends --
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For more on this story::
=> Countrywide CEO Mozilo criticizes customer e-mail - on CNBC.
=> Views on PR and Mozilo in light of this story on Steve Cody's RepMan's Blog.