our digital lives
Sun Sep 20 11:21:36 EDT 2015
I'm listening to the TED Radio Hour and I've just heard a story about How Can Our Real Lives Be Ruined By Our Digital Ones? A woman about to travel to Africa makes a joke about AIDS, gets on her plane, and goes to sleep for the long flight.
I don't use Twitter. I suppose one major difference of twitter (if I understand it correctly) is that anyone there can read everyone else's tweets - there is no privacy. And anyone can re-tweet a tweet, so the good ideas can spread massively. And the funny can spread, and the stupid can spread. And things with no context, things that can will be misunderstood, can spread. And with a 140-character limit, it's not possible to have much context in an individual tweet. You have context with the friends you follow, and you can build context with the strangers you follow. But when something drops in from a new stranger, how can you have any context?
So in 11 hours on a trans-Atlantic flight with no Internet connection, this woman's joke among her small group of followers has been retweeted to millions of total strangers - many of whom find it offensive - and she has been cyber-pilloried. People are calling for her to be fired. Raped. (I've got to wonder about her "friend" who retweeted her to the well-followed cyber-"journalist".) People have figured out what flight she's on, and are tracking the flight. People can't wait for her to discover how thoroughly her life has been destroyed while she was cut away from the internet, and asleep - unable to defend herself, assuming there's any defense possible for words (willfully?) taken out of context.
So much of what I say here is restricted to the people I know, and I am trusting you - all of you - to not broadcast my "private" thoughts and experiences to the world. I do say things here that others could find offensive. I say things about alcoholics, but my life has the context of living with alcoholics (more than one). I say things about obesity; I've been overweight. I say things about smoking/smokers, but smoking is just plain stupid. (I don't need context to defend me on this.) I say things about substance abuse/dependency. I say things about depression. I say things about celebrity. Maybe for some subjects context just requires thinking about the subject, and many people have apparently never done this. I say things about thinking itself, which I guess some people will find offensive - people who don't bother to think for themselves. And maybe what the non-thinkers say and do shouldn't matter to me, but there are a lot of them, and even stupidity is powerful when there's enough of it. And there's more than enough of it. Look at how people act. Or fail to act. Or how they vote. And how many choose not to vote.
And this is not Twitter. While my words can be copied and re-posted, my original postings can still be private. Attention may be drawn to my blog(s), but my public postings probably won't have anything in them that will embarrass me. Or my employer. (The woman above was fired.) Attention may be drawn to my friends' blogs, but I think all of you are also considerate about what you make public. (That's an implicit part of the compact of having various levels of access to my posts.) The person in my life I can't depend on to be careful about what she shares is anniemal, so there's a lot here she doesn't have access to. I used to go through her LJ and friends-lock some of her postings. I don't care who might see what she writes now.
There's things that show up when you search for me on the Internet. There's one in particular about a prank that doesn't clearly attribute who said what. (I explained why the prank was not a good idea. Really, if you're going to post summaries of content from elsewhere, shouldn't your summary make it evident who said what?) Some things are about other people with the same name. There's someone with a very similar name and serious fraud convictions. Chances are you can't correct all the things that are wrong or misleading. And even if you do, the wrong versions will still be out there.
[This entry was originally posted as https://syntonic-comma.dreamwidth.org/769212.html on Dreamwidth (where there are
comments).]
I'm listening to the TED Radio Hour and I've just heard a story about How Can Our Real Lives Be Ruined By Our Digital Ones? A woman about to travel to Africa makes a joke about AIDS, gets on her plane, and goes to sleep for the long flight.
I don't use Twitter. I suppose one major difference of twitter (if I understand it correctly) is that anyone there can read everyone else's tweets - there is no privacy. And anyone can re-tweet a tweet, so the good ideas can spread massively. And the funny can spread, and the stupid can spread. And things with no context, things that can will be misunderstood, can spread. And with a 140-character limit, it's not possible to have much context in an individual tweet. You have context with the friends you follow, and you can build context with the strangers you follow. But when something drops in from a new stranger, how can you have any context?
So in 11 hours on a trans-Atlantic flight with no Internet connection, this woman's joke among her small group of followers has been retweeted to millions of total strangers - many of whom find it offensive - and she has been cyber-pilloried. People are calling for her to be fired. Raped. (I've got to wonder about her "friend" who retweeted her to the well-followed cyber-"journalist".) People have figured out what flight she's on, and are tracking the flight. People can't wait for her to discover how thoroughly her life has been destroyed while she was cut away from the internet, and asleep - unable to defend herself, assuming there's any defense possible for words (willfully?) taken out of context.
So much of what I say here is restricted to the people I know, and I am trusting you - all of you - to not broadcast my "private" thoughts and experiences to the world. I do say things here that others could find offensive. I say things about alcoholics, but my life has the context of living with alcoholics (more than one). I say things about obesity; I've been overweight. I say things about smoking/smokers, but smoking is just plain stupid. (I don't need context to defend me on this.) I say things about substance abuse/dependency. I say things about depression. I say things about celebrity. Maybe for some subjects context just requires thinking about the subject, and many people have apparently never done this. I say things about thinking itself, which I guess some people will find offensive - people who don't bother to think for themselves. And maybe what the non-thinkers say and do shouldn't matter to me, but there are a lot of them, and even stupidity is powerful when there's enough of it. And there's more than enough of it. Look at how people act. Or fail to act. Or how they vote. And how many choose not to vote.
And this is not Twitter. While my words can be copied and re-posted, my original postings can still be private. Attention may be drawn to my blog(s), but my public postings probably won't have anything in them that will embarrass me. Or my employer. (The woman above was fired.) Attention may be drawn to my friends' blogs, but I think all of you are also considerate about what you make public. (That's an implicit part of the compact of having various levels of access to my posts.) The person in my life I can't depend on to be careful about what she shares is anniemal, so there's a lot here she doesn't have access to. I used to go through her LJ and friends-lock some of her postings. I don't care who might see what she writes now.
There's things that show up when you search for me on the Internet. There's one in particular about a prank that doesn't clearly attribute who said what. (I explained why the prank was not a good idea. Really, if you're going to post summaries of content from elsewhere, shouldn't your summary make it evident who said what?) Some things are about other people with the same name. There's someone with a very similar name and serious fraud convictions. Chances are you can't correct all the things that are wrong or misleading. And even if you do, the wrong versions will still be out there.
[This entry was originally posted as https://syntonic-comma.dreamwidth.org/769212.html on Dreamwidth (where there are
comments).]