Added this photo to a post from 8 years ago called "Creepy Clown and New Media."
That mini-essay covered the "stalker collage" and other artistic crowdsourcing phenomena (although the word crowdsourcing didn't exist then). Many of the links are dead but the argument still flies, I think:
Like Creepy Clown, the Tourist Guy is usually a silent, passive witness to some activity, and the chemistry between his cigar store Indian placidity and rambunctious scenes of murder and violence is often hilarious. And once again, anyone with Photoshop could make a "Tourist Guy" masterpiece. This is [the] real New Media art...
Meaning the "street" had already trumped the "top down" concepts of the new media panels of the day such as:
Database Cultures in Collaboration: Panelists discuss the challenges of using databases as the generative engines behind their art work, creating alternative systems that reveal the poetic, metaphoric, critical, and community-building possibilities of manipulating and reconstituting data.