Quote:
Originally Posted by EldrickOnIce
I never read the article, so apologies if I am off point.
If I'm EldrickOnIce, and post something inappropriate on Calgary Puck, who cares - I'm just another Internet ahole who can be warned, suspended or banned to protect the site's public image.
If I'm Bingo, it's entirely different.
I can be an ahole, he can't.
It's my opinion that people who are a public face of something, and aren't smart enough to understand what is and is not appropriate to broadcast, probably should not be in that position anyway.
Harsh but true.
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I think one issue is that it goes both ways. Those that shame are often so far removed from the the person they are shaming that there is no sense of knowing when they've gone too far. Maybe someone should lose their job for what they did. But should they suffer constant ridicule, loss of friends, loss of job prospects? Mob mentality can easily get out of hand.
There is an education component - people are learning that what is shared on the internet can have ramifications several orders of magnitude larger than what a common person is used to. It is still a relatively new medium.
Also, consider Justine's situation - the article says she only had 170 twitter followers when she made her ill-fated tweet. From her perspective, she wasn't sharing something as the face of her company, she was sharing a joke amongst family and friends. Someone forwarded the tweet anonymously to Biddle which then caused the furour. I'm not condoning what she said, only saying that twitter is a new medium, and it's easy to see that Justine could have thought her tweets were in a more private, informal setting.
Never before has the everyday person had access to a global audience so easily. What's worse is, what you put on the internet has a permanence that we aren't used to in normal social settings.