Dave Weigel, The Beautiful Kind, Dissent and Discretion
Posted: June 25th, 2010 | Author: TonyComstock | Filed under: Uncategorized | 5 Comments »A few weeks ago the blogger who goes by TBK was fired after her boss googled her name, and an obscure cache in Twitter’s database linked the blogger’s real name to her anonymous blog. Her boss decided their organization could not risk association with the ideas and images on TheBeautifulKind.com. TBK trusted Twitter, and it turned out her trust was misplaced.
Earlier this week, Dave Weigel’s comments to the private list-serv Journolist were leaked, and Weigel was fired from his job at The Washington Post. Weigel trusted his colleagues on Journolist, and it turned out his trust was misplaced.
My wife and I met online more than 15 years ago, back when that was an awkward thing to admit to “normal people”; and the conventional wisdom at Casa Comstock has been that having indiscreet information on the internet — off color jokes, sexual pictures, whatever — would become more and more common; and that much as past drug use is now tolerated among our politicians, over time having indiscreet online information would become “no big deal.”
But I’ve revised my opinion. Yes, for most people it will be “no big deal”, but it will always be a “big deal” for some people, and you never know when you might become one of those people.
And as every aspect of our society becomes digital — who we talk with, what we say, what we buy, everything — being discreet becomes more and more difficult.
It’s also worth taking a moment to think about what we’re losing. Here’s Marc Ambinder on the now defunct Journolist:
It was a forum. A members-only coffee shop where people who take ideas seriously, who want access to people who take ideas seriously, could test their own ideas before they refined and presented them to the public. As a reporter, I learned a lot about a lot of subjects. It was an enormous resource, and I’ll miss it.
There are plenty of things I miss about the “old internet”; but mostly I miss the optimism. But as much as that’s about the internet growing up, it’s probably just as much about me growing up too.