Remember when you could hide that naughty Polaroid of your hunny-bunny in the back of a closet with all the dirty notes and ball gags, and it would stay hidden until you deemed necessary? Me neither, because I’m not into ball gags (on Amazon.com, really?!), but the point is – in today’s wired world, it’s very hard to keep anything secret; usually, once you hit ‘enter’, it’s out there for the world to see. I was reminded of this the other day when a normal and totally unscandalous tweet that I had sent via Twitter (see Greg To Twitter at right) ended up on one of my e-friend’s web pages. It served to remind me of the golden rule of the internet: act as if everything you type, tweet or create will be seen by the one person you don’t want to see it.
I know it’s not at all a new concept and anyone with even the slightest knowledge of how the inter-tubes work has a solid handle on this, but every once in a while you get a chance to step back and go “Hmmmmm, yeah, that’s right….”
The tweet in question, on Wise Kwai’s aweseome blog about Thai cinema, wasn’t controversial in the slightest, but it was a bit surprising to see it after I’d sent it and forgotten about it, and that, as they say, is the rub.
This blogs readers reader from way back when I started (hi Mom!) will notice that I used to swear quite a bit, but on the advice of a journalist whom I look up to, decided it wasn’t such a great idea (although some blogs that use filthy language are absolutely awesome). It also reminded me of a few emails sent out by an old boss of mine who happened to be a very ‘blue collar’ kind of guy. A couple of accidental ‘reply to all’ hits and he stopped using email altogether.
It could have been much worse, like this guy who tweeted a negative comment about the job he was about to start, which promptly got noticed by one of his future co-workers. Oops.
Or the below post from John McCain’s Twitter feed. You’d think he would know how this could be misconstrued, seeing as he’s a former military guy.
Well, at least he didn’t tweet about his muff keeping his hands warm.At any rate, keep typing, but be careful.
At any rate, keep typing, but be careful.
F! it. If everyone goes about typing Newspeak then no one says what they are really thinking and the ‘moral majority’ (ie 15 born agwaqin fundametalists who write christian crap all over the internet 24/7) have won and everyone else are sheep.
Expletives are common part of the English language, thoughtful use for emphasis (like at the beginning of my comment – to catch people attention) is fine, overuse just shows low class and an inability to articulate oneself.
Fuck Yeah
This is an important rule, and something that didn’t even cross our minds in the heady days when the web was just going public.
My first website was essentially an act of sedition.
As a teen in the mid-90s I set up an AOL user homepage devoted to the new country I had established with a friend. We decided to secede from the U.S. to escape the tyranny of our parents, and declare our bedrooms sovereign territory. We solicited others to join through a form on the website (no one ever did). I seem to recall the background picture on the site was a donkey farting a green cloud with the words “JOIN NOW!” in it. Yes, I have always been classy.
There was no universal search engine (i.e. Google) back then. The web wasn’t quite connected enough for things to go “viral” (unless maybe it got sent around in a chain email).
While I don’t think that the American government would really go after a teenager for a joke website (we thought we were so clever at the time), I wouldn’t want it to pop up in some embarrassing way later on. I shut it down sometime around the turn of the century, realizing this truth, and it seems to be forever and permanently gone from the web. Except for this comment now. Crap.
FBI disclaimer: Everything I have stated above is false.