The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
In the New Yorker...
serious crayons:
I'm reading Nathan Heller's piece about the release of a huge cache of Enron emails in the most recent issue. If it had been about Enron, I wouldn't have read it. But it's about emails, and the things average people write in them. Heller is a good writer, and so far the article is entertaining if not hugely informative (so far).
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: serious crayons on July 21, 2017, 10:10:23 am ---I'm reading Nathan Heller's piece about the release of a huge cache of Enron emails in the most recent issue. If it had been about Enron, I wouldn't have read it. But it's about emails, and the things average people write in them. Heller is a good writer, and so far the article is entertaining if not hugely informative (so far).
--- End quote ---
Thanks for the review. I's sure I would have read it anyway, but I'm glad to have your take on it.
Coincidentally, on Today this morning, they had a discussion about "tweets you should never have sent."
I wonder if that's replaced "e-mails you should never have sent"?
Jeff Wrangler:
OK, over lunch I finished the Hessler article. It frightened me. It really frightened me. I don't know which seems worse to me, Trump remaining in office, or what might happen if he were somehow removed from office.
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on July 21, 2017, 01:32:01 pm ---OK, over lunch I finished the Hessler article. It frightened me. It really frightened me. I don't know which seems worse to me, Trump remaining in office, or what might happen if he were somehow removed from office.
--- End quote ---
Yikes. Now I'm kind of scared to read it.
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on July 21, 2017, 10:45:33 am ---Coincidentally, on Today this morning, they had a discussion about "tweets you should never have sent."
I wonder if that's replaced "e-mails you should never have sent"?
--- End quote ---
They both still exist. But tweets can be far more damaging. I read a book about people who tweeted things -- mostly lame attempts at humor that came off as racist or otherwise disrespectful -- whose lives were ruined. For example, you may remember Justine Sacco (I couldn't remember her last name right away, but it came up in the list of Google suggestions when I typed in "Justine") who tweeted to her followers, who numbered in the low hundreds, "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding! I'm white" -- an attempt to make the point that AIDS hits the black community disproportionately higher but that was interpreted as racist by pretty much the whole world. She boarded a plane and spent 11 hours in blissful ignorance of the fact that she was the No. 1 trending story on Twitter, with the hashtag #hasjustinelandedyet. When she got off the plane, her phone started going crazy with messages of sympathy from people she hadn't talked to in years -- that's how she found out. She wound up losing her job (as a PR person, which arguably isn't a good fit for somebody with poor communication judgment) and for years could not get hired for years.
The author, Ron Ronson, a British journalist, told about half a dozen stories just as horrific. In each one, the person lost their job and sometimes were afraid to leave their house because of death threats. For one victim of this worldwide internet shaming, Ronson got a firm to do pro bono what it usually charges hundreds of thousands to do: scour someone's google search results by flooding the internet with innocuous stories about how much they love kittens or whatever.
He compared the Twitter shaming to old colonial practices like the stocks, designed to publicly humiliate and shame. Twitter does something similar except that the whole world participates.
In contrast with emails, my brother worked with a guy who called the boss a motherfucker or something like that and accidentally hit "reply all." Not only did he keep his job, but apparently the boss wasn't even that upset.
Front-Ranger:
What was it about the story that frightened you, friend Jeff? Was it the language the Trump supporters used when they said they were going to deliver Colorado to Trump: "We're going to start on the Western Slope and do a sweep east and color it red"?
I've overheard such language from my Republican son-in-law and my daughter. I was alarmed at first but then I realized it was all bluster.
There is a larger question related to this that I will ask you over on your blog, if that's okay.
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