Thursday, March 19, 2009
Blog #4 1/2 - Traffic Like Ebay?
The online auction site, eBay, consists of millions of complete strangers from all over the world interacting with each other, yet "'overwhelmingly comes off without a hitch'" . You may wonder how this could be. Apparently the answer is feedback, which gives good sellers a reputation that will earn them more revenue (58). In some ways, traffic is similar to eBay as both require the cooperation and ability of millions of strangers to interact with each other. This has raised the question: if there was feedback on people's driving, would they drive safer? Some researchers have considered developing a call-in system where people can either complain about bad driving and compliment good driving. A careful record would then be kept, and each driver would be punished (via higher insurance premiums, suspension of license, etc.) (58). I think this is a ridiculous idea. For one thing, who would ever call in to compliment someone's driving? The whole system would quickly become a giant tattling fiasco, and who knows when someone will just decide to call someone in just because they were in a bad mood. This idea assumes the eBay tagline that "'People are Good''' (57). Though many people try to to good, you can never count on society as a whole to "be good".
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1 comment:
I agree that there wouldn't be any way that a call system like that to monitor driving could work. Nobody would call in to compliment other people's driving, as you said. I also think that people are mostly good, but they are also lazy and/or selfish, so this system would never work because, as you said, almost no one would do onto others as they would want done onto them.
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