I hate how everything has to be public nowadays. If you do something silly or embarrassing you need to take into account that everybody have cameras with them at all times, and enough people have no qualms about posting others private moments online for the world to see. I'm a private person, I don't want videos or pictures of me available for everyone. To be constantly surrounded by internet connected cameras definitely makes me less likely to risk look like an ass, even among friends.
What gets me about this is how you can be as scrupulous and disciplined as you please about staying off social media, wiping up your digital footprints, etc., but then as soon as you go out in public, someone can just blithely make the decision for you, to put you on social media.
To say nothing of all the proliferating random stationary surveillance cameras and police bodycams out there. Which if you're "fortunate" enough to live in Orlando FL or Washington County OR, is now connected to a facial recognition ML model.
Where is the backlash, where is the outrage about this? Why do people just stupidly let dumb shit proliferate, and only years later say "Oops we did it again?"
Telling a few friends used to be the default, and telling everybody took more effort. Now the default is for people to share their comments with ~2 billion people. It's actually more work to tell only your friends.
>Somehow, after all of this, fans of the thread still remained adamant that no wrong had been committed. “We do it everyday to celebrities. No difference. Outrage culture is so dumb,” wrote one Instagram user below a BuzzFeed News post on the story.
It does seem no different from what society seems to be ok with towards celebrities. I have always been uncomfortable with the idea that because someone is on a TV show, society is ok having photographers follow them around 24/7 and reporting on their personal lives.
There are a great many celebrities whose lives are still private. They simply don't play the game: don't have social media, don't arrange for paparazzi to "catch" them leaving a nightclub, or invite a magazine through the doors of their house.
So it seems the confusion is two fold. People believing that their access to celebrity lives are anything other than arranged PR opportunities, and then believing everyday people should be subject to that incorrectly interpreted behaviour.
At your first point, this is really only true for celebs like Paris Hilton who make their money through appearances and are famous for being famous, but a lot of celebrities have paparazzis following them around all day, everyday and certainly don't want it. Just google "paparazzi kristen stewart" too see how much she abhors it and how invasive it is in her life.
I can sort of understand politicians (even then...), but definitely not celebrities or otherwise there's this concept of "public person" that seems awfully free form. We also don't really combat paparazzi well at all.
It gets rather bothersome. My professional life at least is pretty public and it's sort of my job. But I'm pretty happy that there weren't ubiquitous cameras and videos around when I was younger.
In practice, most of us are somewhat protected by sheer numbers and the fact that people move on and a lot of information does effectively rot over time.
Balanced against that though is the increasingly number of cameras and automated recognition and categorization systems. And the whole mob mentality. Obviously in the cases where it has actually led to deaths. But also in the, perhaps rare, but well-documented cases where a stupid off-hand remark or action triggers the social media machine and the path of least resistance is career-ending firings and the like.
I somewhat agree to your point that the sheer volume of new stuff makes most things disappear rather fast from the public eye. But what used to be a moment among friends, let's say spontaneous skinny dipping or a badly chosen joke, gets shared with everyone in your extended circles and is easily saved and brought up whenever in the future.
Then there's the mob mentality issue you mention, and perhaps more relevant to this article. Even after it passes the names and images are still around when people search your name. It's on your permanent record.
Absolutely, I have an effectively unique name as far as the Internet is concerned. So, if I were to become "Internet famous" for something problematic, it's pretty much a given that would be near the top of search terms any time someone searched on me whether a recruiter or anyone else.
Worse though is probably if you share a name with someone Internet notorious and plausibly could be confused with that person. A story I like to tell is pre-Web but someone I know in NYC shared a name with someone who got into a very public and polarizing local spat and something. My friend literally got death threats left on his voicemail.
If this only went on on Twitter or whatever, this would have come to pass. The reason it's "blown up" is due to media attention, ironically from the likes of The Atlantic and all the other media channels who decided it was funny and wanted to carry the story because everyone else was.
The Atlantic should be outraged at itself along with all the media family.
Right here The Atlantic is masterfully playing the issue from both sides. It could have addressed the issue genetically, of course.
Most obviously relevant is Black Lives Matter. Police brutality and other biased policing has been happening in America since the beginning. The media have been generally happy to ignore it. (Even when they cover mob killings, it's often been with a neutral or even approving tone. [1]) BLM happened because of social media, because 300m people are now publishers and editors, not just article subjects.
Since then we've seen plenty more. If you're not on Twitter, you may not hear about these things until you see media coverage. But that doesn't mean they're not significant events, both societally or for the people involved.
I dunno, maybe you’re right, do people really get sucked in to “moments”?
I think one reason things blow up on Twitter has to do with with the magnification and positive feedback loop that goes on between itself and other mediums. If it were self contained the impact and general awareness would be much reduced.
Sure. But socially mediated positive feedback loops are an important part of human society. That describes basically any social movement.
It's the job of the media to report what's going on, and Twitter is at the size where something happening there is a legitimate news topic. I would agree it's probably overrepresented, as the great bulk of journalists use Twitter, and it makes many of the aspects of content-generation much easier.
At one point there was a clear distinction between "online" and "the real world". But I think that is now misleading. Online is now one important part of the real world. We won. Now we have to figure out what to do about it.
"Orville", a semi-serious version of Star Trek by Seth MacFarlane has one amusing "Black Mirror"-ultra-lite episode about this: "Majority Rule". In this world, law has been replaced by a simple upvote/downvote system and pictures of people doing stupid things can go viral on a "global feed".
If you disrupt someone's career, or their personal life, to advance your own career and fame, then you are certainly liable for damages, in the normal legal sense, unless you can prove public interest. If the targeted woman had been an elected politician, it might be possible to prove public interest, but in this case, public interest, in the legal sense, seems unlikely. And Blair has already admitted she did this to advance her career:
-----------------
“I’m an actress, comedian and a writer and so is my dude. Also if anyone wants to send us plane tickets we are more than happy to try and find your very own #PlaneBae,” she tweeted, before asking for a job at BuzzFeed. Brands also jumped into the fray, as brands are wont to do. Alaska Airlines called what Blair did a “good deed” and offered her a free flight. T-Mobile offered Blair free Wi-Fi.
I feel like modern tech and social media are exposing just how little we respect boundaries, as a culture and a society. This is a huge violation but it happens all the time.
It’s terrifying, and because those whose boundaries are violated quite rightly choose to stay anonymous, you only hear the projection from those who have deluded themselves into thinking they’re doing good, despite the fact it was never asked for.
There are good deeds and then pure sociopathy; ego massaging, narcissism...I have to wonder how much envy was involved in that.
This isn’t about losing privacy in public, it’s respecting the fucking boundaries. People need their space, they don’t need others leeching from it to benefit themselves.
There's no need to lay the blame at 'culture' and 'society'. The problem is that you only need a thousand assholes in the million that read your story to cause major problems. Even in the most amazing culture and society you may expect 1 in a 1000 to be an asshole.
I think most humans are reasonable people. Many are even great people, no matter how much you may disagree with them about many small things. The problem is just the 1 asshole in a 1000 that has an outsized influence.
Blame isn’t a good word for this (not what I intended either) because it suggests superiority, knowing better.
If we are not engaged in leading by example then it does come back to culture and society.
So, I agree but not entirely. Twitter and modern social media is practically a democratized manifestation of the paparazzi and the gossip mag. Gossip in this form is toxic as fuck - we’re not small villages where everybody knows each other any more.
The effect of these things is often significant due to how poorly managed some channels are, though. And it's not always due to large size, it happens in schools all the time and we call it bullying.
For instance, this kind of thing could affect your job and lose you your job, which shouldn't actually be a thing, and we should ask why is this a thing or why is this a problem?
Consider SWATting, it only works because there's a framework in place to make it work.
Why are threats effective?
A lot of this is preexisting problems that manifest in bullying and stalking and frankly they're not handled very well, the victim often has little to no recourse. So it more seems like we do not have good solutions to these issues, socially OR legally.
>For instance, this kind of thing could affect your job and lose you your job, which shouldn't actually be a thing, and we should ask why is this a thing or why is this a problem?
The issue is that, in times past, if you said something stupid and unfunny in a bar with some friends on a Saturday night, probably no one would even remember it in the morning. Today, if you're unlucky, there's at least some finite possibility that for certain types of things, it will end up on YouTube, your company is being DDOSd, your company hashtag is being flooded with demands for your firing, there are news stories about you, and the path of least resistance is for your company to announce that you are no longer with them. I'm not sure what law prevents that from happening.
I'm saying the issue here is how affected you are by something like losing your job, and how likely it is to happen.
> the path of least resistance is for your company to announce that you are no longer with them.
This is kind of the issue. There's no room for reasonable discourse, or taking a risk.
Realistically, someone saying something about you on social media should be uninteresting, and a company shouldn't have to worry about that as much, but things got crooked and somehow it makes sense for a company to be very jumpy about these things. That doesn't actually make sense, and we should examine how we got here. This is not the only place this shows up, a similar problem is it being very difficult for someone to get a job if they had a criminal offense.
I get an overwhelming sense that Internet mediated connectivity between people has produced a societal phenomenon that is an analogue of psychosis within a single brain. It's like there is just not enough dampening to prevent wild feedback loops. I imagine that a normally functioning brain has some way of dealing with the problem and maybe society will eventually evolve something. In the mean time, there's nothing to do but keep your head down. It's terrifying to me that being polite and nodding and being tolerant of others is not enough to keep one out of trouble though.
Besides the disgusting nature of this "stunt", having commercial entities like the Alaska Airlines and T-Mobile is where the disgust really goes up the scale, a good deed - really? Can I record the CEO of Alaska Airlines' family in their backyard and broadcast it widely on Twitter, is that a good deed? No, it isn't.
What is weird is that there doesn't look like any law was broken, does it?
I was arguing with a female friend who strongly argues that people have the right to their own image, so it should be forbidden to take picture of them. On the other hand, when you go into a public place, you should be photographed because it is a matter of freedom of speech: we should be able to record people committing crimes or felonies.
I guess that it should be illegal to record people without their knowledge, if they are not committing any crime, meaning as long as the person recording is not doing it for legal or investigative purposes.
But to be honest, the problem to me, again, is how people behave online and how they gang with each others. Harassing, doxxing, and insulting people online should have consequences. It's really bad that people will write things online they might never say in front of people.
There is always a grey area about what you can do and not do about data that has other people in it. The internet has not been a good thing for privacy.
It depends on the jurisdiction (2 party consent vs. 1 party, etc.). It depends if there was an "expectation of privacy." It depends if the image or video is being used for a commercial purpose like advertising. [ADDED: I'm mostly discussing the US here.]
This case is probably questionable but, to your point, if I take a picture of you canoodling in a public park I'm perfectly within my rights to publish that image so long as it's not for marketing or advertising purposes (if people are recognizable).
I think the tweeter may end up having problems over the fact that she did try to exploit the tweets for fame and advantage. If it had been just sharing observations about something happening around her, she'd likely be fine. Trying to gain personally from the story makes it much more shaky on an ethical level for me.
And there's no excuse for encouraging people to seek out the subject's identity. Awful idea all around.
> This case is probably questionable but, to your point, if I take a picture of you canoodling in a public park I'm perfectly within my rights to publish that image so long as it's not for marketing or advertising purposes (if people are recognizable).
It depends on the jurisdiction.
Mainland europe tends to have pretty strong personality rights, especially (but not solely) for non-public persons (e.g. people who aren't politicians or athletes or stars or more generally in the public consciousness).
And in many countries there you would not be within your rights to publish a specific image of a couple "canoodling in a public park". You would if you were taking a picture of something else entirely (e.g. a crowd, a public event, a landmark or monument) and they just happened to be in the frame, but not if they were the subject.
My bad. I was specifically referring to the US which indeed tends to tilt more toward freedom of speech/press vs. privacy rights than many other countries do.
I’ve seen similar interactions where people seem to think they have a lot more power over their image than they do legally, or certainly seem like, to me, ethical should have.
I was in a local public street market and I was trying to take a picture of an o next sitting on a vendor’s table (not sure if it was a lamp, sculpture, or something else).
The guy became very irate, came out from behind the table, started yelling, bumped his chest to mine, and said I couldn’t take a picture and that I had to leave or he would call “management” and “the police.”
It was very odd and interesting because he’s set up in a public place. He wasn’t really up for discussion, but when I said that it was legal to take pictures of public spaces he said that he didn’t want me to and if I didn’t respect his wishes I had to leave. I was standing in the street where his table was set up, so it was doubly odd.
Legally, in the US, it’s fine to take photos in public spaces (and usually even sell them) [0] but I can’t find opinion poll data to see if it’s common for people to think this should be restricted.
I try to think of how this will play out given trends in tech and transhumanism. Eventually we’ll likely have total clarity archives of everything we experience. How do we balance people’s freedom to their own senses vs people’s preferences?
I think we’re covered with current laws to prevent illegal acts done with the photos (fraud, harassment, etc). But not sure what we should do to stop photos or help people not care about photos.
I'm not sure that's a great example. In the US, legally, you're probably right. As a matter of good manners, if a vendor at a crafts fair in a public space puts up a "No photos please" sign, I'm going to respect their wishes. They're paying for a stall to sell things, not to be a photo subject.
If I'm shooting pics on a street or a park and someone makes it clear they don't want their picture taken, I'm not going to insist on my legal rights. (BTW, this is a different case from officials saying I can't take pictures of some public space because security or whatever--although I mostly won't care enough to try to make a point.)
Just because something's legal, doesn't mean you have to insist on doing it against someone's wishes.
This is why I was looking for opinion data as I feel quite differently in that a “please no photos” is an unreasonable request.
I’m not going out of my way to bother the person, but if I need a photo, then I will take it. I don’t think that’s part of general politeness. And being publicly visible is part of buying a stall (free in this venue).
Again, I think of this in the viewpoint of how I archive my life. Should I turn off my recording to please everyone’s various wishes, if they are unreasonable.
However, I feel differently in someone’s home or a public business where their requests may not have legal binding, but I’d certainly comply.
Fame used to be something you had to ask for, because being famous required access to limited infrastructure. Media access was scarce, and so you had to work to be noticed by the gatekeepers of that infrastructure.
Digital communication an internetworking fundamentally changed that; the cost to publish dropped to approximately zero. Basic media access is de facto no longer scarce. You no longer need to appeal to a gatekeeper when you can e.g. post a tweet for free.
This means it it now possible to accidentally reach a much larger audience than the most of the pre-internet media. Fame is now something that can happen to you. Worse, the traditional idea of fame was something you could walk away form. You simply quit participating; being some type of celebrity was a job that required maintenance. When you become accidentally famous on Twitter/etc it is often your normal life that happened to become famous. Walking away form that means walking away from your normal life.
For a very good explanation of this topic, I recommend this[1] video.
> celebrities choose to put themselves in the spotlight.
It does not follow that e.g. if your day job is singing or acting, that you want people to interrupt you and take photos when you are eating in a restaurant, or discuss your relationships in a tabloid. Many would view it as an unfortunate side-effect of the job, or worse.
Agreed. However, many musicians are not and they are very influential in that. I remember when Dave Matthews was in his heyday, he says he could mostly just walk down the street like normal but not if he surrounded himself with an entourage and dressed up like a celebrity.
Yep they can often blend right in if they want to. One time my friend was in an ordinary rock club in Seattle standing in a group of people waiting to talk to the (popular-but-not-mega-famous) musicians who had just finished their set. Next to him is an unassuming, nebbishy guy with glasses waiting politely. The musicians eventually make their way to this fan, he starts talking and out comes this deep baritone voice... turns out it's fucking Eddie Vedder.
> Many would view it as an unfortunate side-effect of the job, or worse.
It is somewhat unfortunate, but it's also well-understood, as you start working to get into these spaces you know it's a significant risk especially if you're aiming for the more popular kind of public act[0].
And that's not a recent phenomenon either, public performers have had significantly lowered expectations of privacy… ever since the concept has existed really.
What I mean to say is: if you're an artist, you're aware that this shit is a risk, and you can act to mitigate it, and it's a pain and tiring but at least it's that. And if you know dealing is not an option, you take a different path or take care to hide your identity early on (à la Banksy) or use some other means of separating a public persona and a more discrete private one.
If you're a rando, the expectation is not that you're going to be made "famous" for mundane actions, it's not a side-effect or your career and benefits, and you're basically hosed.
[0] Dave Chambers / Blindboy Boatclub can probably expect less intrusiveness into their private life and actions than Beyonce or Chris Pratt
Do you think that was always the expectation? In a few short years, if the current path continues, we'll have an "expectation" that random people have just as little right to privacy. This seems to fall into the same boat as, if I don't stand up for others (in this case, celebrities, who are still people, no matter how envious we may be of them), then who will stand up for me?
But I don't think there's any slippery slope there. People who aggressively court public attention should expect to receive public attention. People who don't generally shouldn't. (The exception for me being people who willfully harm others.)
Mark Twain seems like a different breed; a man who could certainly give as good as he got. He didn't court public attention (solely) for the rewards of fame, but because he was whip smart and wanted to engage.
Compare that to Michael Jackson or Britney Spears (or any number of artists up and down the sliding scale of celebrity). Sure, they wanted to engage with the world through their music and their art, but I don't think they defined themselves as people solely through their craft, and I think (opinion) it should have been their right to determine on what channels they publicly engaged with the world. Not legally, but as a matter of common decency.
Or does everyone who e.g. publishes open source software deserve to be doxxed?
I think there's a big difference between releasing some open-source software and setting out to profit from being a public figure.
Michael Jackson and Britney Spears put themselves front and center. But J.D. Salinger, for example, didn't. I think the former don't really get to complain that people are interested in the product they are selling. Scientists are another good example here. Carl Sagan clearly sought celebrity (and used it very well). Plenty of Nobel Prize winners didn't.
I also agree "wanting to engage" is an important part of it. Steve Bannon clearly likes being in the public eye, while Stephen Miller doesn't. But both of them are seeking to shape the lives of millions, and so to my mind are legitimate focuses of public attention.
I think that line is blurrier than we engineers might often want to admit. What's the difference in the end? Money? A legal contract with stipulations?
I think the core of my question is this. You agree we have a right to choose whether we want to engage with the public. Do we have a fine-grained right to engage in one area of life, but not others?
Historically, I think this has been the case (e.g. keeping family out of politics), but I think the line is blurring over time, and I'm not sure that's a good thing.
I think it depends a lot on the manner of engagement and the area of life. Most pop stars don't just sell music. They sell themselves as personalities, as icons. This is often true about politicians as well. Much less so for authors and software developers, though; there, what they're offering is generally the work, not themselves.
I think keeping family out of politics is not so much about keeping one area of the public figure's life private as allowing the family members to keep their own lives private. Maybe that line is blurring, but I'm not sure the public is entirely to blame. Politicians often use families as props and even shields, as when the wife literally stands by a philandering politician in the apology press conference. And the Trump administration has actively involved the whole family in governing. So I'm not sure I'd lay changes here at the feet of social media.
> People who aggressively court public attention should expect to receive public attention
I would only add that in some cases (some of them notable today) people have nothing to contribute besides a desire for public attention. Public attention is not a right or a tap that can be turned on at will, and I don't care to give it to dull, uninteresting and shallow people.
They knowingly take a well understood risk, yes, but that doesn't make it ok. It's also well understood that walking around certain parts of town dressed certain ways is dangerous, but it doesn't make mugging me ok when I do.
Not the op but I'll give it a try. When a " celebrity" advertises perfumes, watches, clothing, erectile disfunction therapies, etc... they intentionally blend the gap between their public persona and private life for profit.
In such circumstances it is hypocritical in my opinion to complain of invasion of privacy as they literally sold parts of it to the public. It is with a 100% certainty that the simple and the easily excitable will see this as an invitation to get closer.
Going from "appears in an ad" to "want to dictate every detail" (GP) requires some serious mental gymnastics in non-euclidean spaces of higher dimensions... I don't know how that sort of conclusion works.
Actually I don't even get the deduction from "appears in an ad" to "hypocritical to complain about invasion of privacy".
Do you think somebody who's appeared in an advert should ever be allowed to seek an injunction against a stalker? Or is that just a choice they've made and have to live with?
And that's why I think it's immoral for parents to put their kids into the entertainment industry. Even if the industry wasn't exploitative the kid has no understanding of what they're giving up and whether it's more important than money.
I fear we are all one misstep away from going viral for all the wrong reasons. In a world where people die taking ill-advised selfies and YouTube is glutted with pranking videos that all try to one up each other, it seems that exposure and attention is the new currency. The problem is that they can use and discard you if you are doing something that fits their narrative for attention.
And then you have online mobs. With wildfire falsehoods. For example, people were killed in India because of false rumors spread on WhatsApp:
The lesson of the story: don't say anything publicly to anyone ever, because everyone around has a camera in their pocket and is way too hungry for internet points.
Further isolating ourselves would hurt in other areas. As someone else said, we need a cultural change, one where we need not to have to constantly distrust other people because they respect boundaries. One of the best ways to do this would be to reduce the amount of value stupid internet popularity points seem to matter and push dopamine buttons.
What would the game theoretic outcome be if this kind of thing were facilitated at scale by an AI? Ie, imagine a world where your chance of being globally exposed like this was a non-trivial measure due to ever present AI generating memes based on public human behaviors? I wonder if the end result is a society wide abandonment of "fan in" [1] capable media like Twitter.
Lower risk, I'd think, than now. There's only room for a few concurrent big memes on the internet, and the risk of becoming one of those is split among all of the people exposed to it. AI generating an increased flood of it would just increase the noise.
Blair has posted a public apology.[1] It's arguably self-serving and there are people defending her actions. This whole situation is what is wrong with social media; refined and concentrated.
That's absolutely right. This was clearly obnoxious on the part of at least a couple people as well as the "mob." And it may have violated some clandestine recording statute depending on what jurisdiction it took place in. But I can't feel that the solution is some sort of right to be forgotten on steroids where anyone can get media that don't like for any reason to be taken down across social media and search. (Probably not practical anyway even if people were OK with that--which they wouldn't be.)
Laws can't keep up with technology. But it may be time for a law to come into fruition since everyone is now a paparazzi and you don't have to be a celeb to be a target.
They know the name of the individual who recorded it and transmitted it to Twitter. They can go after her if there is a law and hopefully have a real punishment in place for this kind of behavior.
Furthermore the individual who recorded it also profited off it. She has a career that depends on how much exposure she gets and this is apparently the biggest thing she's done. She was also offered something by Alaska Airlines (their tweet was deleted), tried to get a Buzzfeed job from the attention, sent out some tweet about getting free plane tickets from her followers, and increased her exposure even more via the tons of new followers she gained.
There may be a technical solution on Twitter's end — adjust their feed algorithm. I feel like their shift towards algorithmically ranking the Twitter feed (versus chronologically) has dramatically increased the reach of viral moments like this.
They're trying to maximize user engagement/addiction and it's working. But what cost is their algorithm imposing on society? We're seeing more outrage in politics, more clickbait in journalism, and more privacy violations like this. Engagement-obsessed algorithms have created massive externalities which we all pay for.
Really? Then you could sue me for recording you committing a crime?
Ok, let's add an exception for really obvious cases. What if you are taken to trial and later found not guilty (despite my recording being used as evidence against you). Can you sue me now?
You can see how deep the rabbit hole goes. Beware unintended consequences. If you're in a public place then I have every right to record you.
I think this would have more negative effects than positive. There’s the aspect of it’s now impossible to run security cameras or film police beating people.
But what about hearing aids and vision assistance devices? Does HoloLens become impossible without consent from everyone?
I’ve suggested a fix before - once you follow or get more than a certain number of followers, say 15, there should be a fee to tweet, and a much higher one to retweet.
Isn’t kinda the point of her statement that she isn’t unidentified? She was made famous by somebody else without her knowledge and consent.
When a production crew wants to use footage of you in a show they have to get you to sign a release. There probably needs to be some form of this for online exposure as well. What form that would take is a difficult question.
> She was made famous by somebody else without her knowledge and consent.
She was made famous by the attention-seeking couple, her "plane boyfriend" and the exploitive media.
It's amazing how such a nonstory was milked by everyone for publicity and profit. And the theatlantic is still going at it.
If the poor woman wants privacy, how about theatlantic stop writig about the "Plane-Bae Woman"? How about focus on the couple who "set her up" to gain media following? How about focus on the "plane boyfriend" who knew about the couple filming them and used that for publicity by appearing all over TV and hinting that the unsuspecting woman had sex with him in the plane bathroom ( probably because the producer told him they needed juicy story from him ).
Or most importantly, how about the atlantic shine a light on itself and the media which turn a non-story into a major story because they need to exploit everything and everyone for money?
The story should be on everyone but the woman and yet the title is "Plane-Bae Woman".
And the atlantic is lying when they say "unidentified" woman when the "boyfriend" identified her and the media spent an entire week exploiting this woman and this story.
Instead of "Unidentified Plane-Bae Woman...", how about "Everything Wrong with the Media and Attention Seeking People"? Put the focus on the problem, not the victim.
> If the poor woman wants privacy, how about theatlantic stop writig about the "Plane-Bae Woman"?
That honestly oversimplifies the issue. There's a narrative out there, that is clearly affecting how random people are interacting with her, not to mention her perception of herself.
Sometimes you have to control the narrative with the other perspective after the problem happens to mitigate the damage.
Stuff like this is never simple, it affects real people. Real people have to be talked about after real people are talked about unfairly. Not everything can be generalized, abstracted, and distilled into a philosophy.
And while they're at it, I hope there have been consequences, if only some serious soul searching, for the Alaska Air and T-Mobile PR people who apparently jumped on this.
While I agree it’s really awful for the “legitimate” companies to jump on this - in reality it wasn’t a boardroom decision, it was some millennial they put in charge of the twitter account who has been raised with the same lack of awareness and social respect as the clowns that recorded it to begin with.
Yes. That's one reason I wouldn't be calling for anyone's head over it. As you suggest, it's probably one or more young, inexperienced PR/social media people at those companies who thought they were doing something clever. I'd much rather these and other companies take it as an opportunity to reconsider their actions and put better policies in place rather than firing someone so as to be seen as "doing something."
I have to admit that this is the first I've seen of this "scandal", but it appears to be "people chat on airplane". Is it a slow news week for the gossip rags?
Creepy lady with no sense of boundaries got on a plane, switched seats with someone behind her so she could be with her SO. She then spent the entire rest of the flight watching the person she switched with chat with the person she would have sat next to, reading every interaction as a budding romance.
She took a ton of photos of these interactions, captioned them with her speculations, and posted them to Twitter. This thread went viral.
If they did that then they'd have to admit to themselves and the world that they're only making the situation worse, not better, by focusing on these types of stories.
Seinfeld and Galifianakis had an interesting chat in Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee about privacy & fame. What I took from it is that people broadly have different privacy expectations and even would label the same settings as public vs. private. Anyways, I was already thinking about that conversation, but it’s even more interesting to see it played down to the level of any random person.
This is why I support physical violence! If more people were to also follow this mantra, it would immunize all of us from assholes who seek to ruin our lives on the way to fame.
They can use violence too. And since you okayed, it. They're justified in posting pictures of you lying bloodied in the street, saying karma's a bitch.
There’s a serious problem when the degree of attention becomes asymmetrical. Many more people can focus on you than you can focus on in return, and flood every line of communication you have (digital or in real life) with hateful or harassing messages. Our infrastructure isn’t built for this; you can’t sort through emails or texts fast enough to eliminate the unsolicited ones, your voicemail will run out of space, and your ability to walk to the store may become literally impossible when a mob of people surround you. We are also not built psychologically to be okay having to monitor literally millions of potential threats or allies. There is a reason celebrities have to hire people whose sole job it is to protect them from this sort of harassment, and those are people who have already opted out of privacy.
Does not seem like an intractable problem: penalize obstruction of free movement, mandate cryptographically signed approval of email contact for organizations, filter the rest with a whitelist.
Not saying it is easy, but definitely not impossible.
On the other hand, I use my real full name here and most everywhere else. I agree that explicitly rejecting anonymity is a solution, but strongly disagree that it would work for everyone or should be forced on anyone.
I agree it wouldn't work for everyone but I actually find using True Names a good filter for my own actions. When I write something, it forces me to ask whether I'm OK with people associating it with real me. And if I'm not, with fairly rare exceptions, that's probably because it's something mean, snarky, or offensive that probably doesn't really improve the Internet in any way.
OK – you first! Everything you do or say in public will now be documented and that documentation easily searchable under your real name. Have a nice day!
Village is a close-knit community where everyone else may easily punish you if you abuse the system of communal knowledge.
In a wider world people can abuse it but won't get any consequences at all because of enormous resources needed to monitor for relatively minor things. So the example is quite irrelevant.
I grew up in a village and I think it was worse. Every mistake and misstep was known by all. Prejudices existed before you were born and couldn’t be escaped. “Close knit community” is a nice wa my of saying lots of busybody assholes (and also some kind and caring folks too).
There was a whole different set of pressure and I’d take internet shaming over not being able to live in certain areas or date certain people any day.
I empathise with your emotion but that has more to do with how closed groups work, local culture and basic human nature. It's not about abuse of uncontrollable information flow. Try to leak some villager's "public secrets" to "outsiders" while still living in the village and see for yourself what will happen to you.
Interestingly, there was a complex set of layers about what secrets were leakable (“Betsy is a whore when drunk”) vs not (“Joe is a pedarast and don’t let your kids be alone with him.”).
But my point is that villages suck too. I voted with my feet over the problems of a giant crowd of people potentially knowing your business, vs a small group always knowing your business and constantly interfering.
And I don't judge the choice. But implying that by switching one problem for another makes either of them not worthy of solving or considering on its own, because the other seems bigger, just feels wrong.
So she's retained counsel and preparing to file a suit? Against whom? $TWTR?
The only viable strategy in the current media saturated clime is to embrace the attention. Every human on earth now possesses a mobile news studio in their pocket. There is no such thing as bad publicity for your own personal brand. If caught with your pants down. Put it in your bio. And re-invent yourself as the #planebae matchmaker offering services at a discounted rate for followers!
There is another viral media piece today about the discovery in Mythic Ireland by dronespotters. Circulating around the hashtag #NewHenge. It's the discovery of a lifetime. Has spread around the world in a matter of days. And will probably result in eternal archaeological renown for the finders on a Heinrich Schliemann level of glory. Or at least, they'll never have to buy a pint in County Meath for the rest of their lives.
There is no hiding from the World anymore. Just embrace your own true authentic self.
It would make sense to me: if someone causes distress on someone else through their actions, I imagine you can make a legal case for going after him/her, especially if the first person does it for a gain (of notoriety, publicity, fame, etc) rather than by accident.
I wonder if a lawsuit alleging sander and line would apply here. I actually hope that the couple and the news organizations who started the whole thing get sued.
No, But the lady they exploited is saying that they misrepresented her for their own benefit. I think I would be tempted to sue them for slander if I were her.
