Everyone that's bored and on the Internet would've read about the latest PR fiasco from Justine Sacco, and right off its' tail, Gogo wireless. Her tweet in itself, while definitely un-PC, has probably been uttered by a slew of comedians or drunk people during parties. That's my whole point entirely. Look at those scenarios. Context. You cannot capture context in Twitter. Twitter and any other social content curation websites are the worst at providing context. You pluck a sentence from a conversation and it's very easy for it to sound horribly worse than it is. That's why 'Overhead in....' websites are hilarious because you don't really know the full story but pick one out of every five sentences and you can turn it into a 'That's what she said' nudge-nudge joke quickly.
Twitter allows people to retweet their tweets with no relation to any prior conversation. Anyone who cares about their brand, be it corporate or personal, have to, despite how annoying it is, be aware of this. While this woman is in PR and probably has some exposure to the public, I am sure she never realized she would get picked up by the media. For example, if I'm on the street and I do something ridiculous, say, being engrossed in texting and walk into a pole, I realize that I am public domain. Literally anyone can take a photo or record me and that would be the end of it. Never mind that I was on my phone for a serious emergency, the first instinct anyone would react to when watching a video of me walking into a pole while texting would be ridicule.
I find it fairly impossible to present research that isn't unbiased. There is a difference between presenting data points, which yes, can be factual, and telling a story with data points. When storytelling, you have no choice but to form a string of information together, thereby omitting other information or building up a string of sentences to form a point of view. That's not unbiased. That's you picking a lens in which to tell your story. It can be based in facts - but it's still biased. I didn't grow up in the US, so I visit a number news sites that are non-American - some UK and some Asian. I have noticed that the same news stories can be told in entirely different perspectives, using the same facts but with nuances of words that change the story completely. I've noticed in more extroverted cultures, a quiet person can be described as 'withdrawn' whereas more introverted cultures use the word 'reserved'. Notice how this switches the connotation describing the person.
Back to the original story. In the past, it might have been that everyone was looking for their five minutes of fame, uploading photos and videos to try and strike Internet fame (evocative of settlers looking for 'liquid gold' in the Wild Wild West). Today, one would actually have to avoid it. At any step, you could explode into Internet. Your publicly shared photo on Facebook might be used for a post on Buzzfeed, a brand could pick up the tweet you hashtagged and retweet it to their million followers. The world is watching and waiting to pounce. I have several social media sites and while I am not consciously vetting my responses - I am always aware that they can be uncovered one day, in which case, I would probably suffer the same fate as the woman above because somehow, something I wrote or took a photo of would be taken out of context. I would probably delete everything, cover my tracks and try to start over. But in the mean time, I constantly remind myself that this stream of content I publish online that for some reason I feel is private, might be discovered one day.
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