Not Worth Sharing

Yesterday I was mentioning that I couldn't find many updates on the Swift Beach area from my local news and was searching all over the web for an alternative. As so often happens, I eventually found my way over to Twitter. My logic seemed sound because if the guy living next to Osama Bin Laden could live-Tweet the SEAL mission than I thought my odds were pretty high of finding one person to give me an update from a fairly-populated section of Massachusetts. While I did find a couple people who mentioned what was going on in the area, my best source of information continued to be the local news site. (We drove down to the area this afternoon to have a look for ourselves and it appears we were very lucky to escape the damage. The debris from the storm had left a clear line of just how close the water was to the house and we were about two feet away from having problems. Remind me to mark down how big the storm surge was for future references, because any more than that and we would have been in trouble.) The main thing I found on Twitter was a reminder that people need to be a lot more careful about how they portray themselves on the internet.

At first I was willing to overlook the large number of kids whining about wanting school to be cancelled the next day. I'm sure if I had access to Twitter when I was in high school I would have been doing the same thing. However, I'm not sure I would have been doing quite so early in the day, because when I was in high school I was well aware school was almost never cancelled until the last minute. (I have noticed that while people may have no idea what it might take for you to stay home from work during a natural disaster, when it gets to that point they are extremely aware of exactly what it will take for them to be able to sleep in tomorrow. You would think these kids would know that.) However, I am positive my complaints back in the day would not have had that many spelling errors. I've spoken a few times about my dislike of 'text-speak' on Twitter, but that would have been an upgrade on a couple of these. With one particular tweet I was mildly concerned the person was in the middle of a stroke and trying to text for help. (Seriously, why is it the kids calling for a day off from school always seem to be the ones who would be best served by a few more hours in the classroom?) I'm not sure if it is worse getting no information or information written in a code I'm not familiar with. But it was a few of the other messages I read around the tweets I was looking for which really had me concerned for the American Education System.

For the most part I'm sure that these kids don't care that one guy who was looking for one specific piece of information looked at their Twitter feed for 30 seconds and will never go back again. Nor should they, because I'm just a guy with a blog. But, if I can find your profile by accident and begin to draw conclusions about you (no matter how wrong they may be) than there is nothing stopping any teacher, parent or potential employer from doing the same and that could have some real consequences. I think a lot of people start out their Facebook or Twitter feeds with the dream that someone will stumble across their pages and be so impressed with their observations they will be given a 7-figure book, TV and movie deal. Hey, it has happened before, so why can't it happen again? This promise of eventual fame leads to everyone being on their best behavior for their first couple of weeks on social media. The problem is that after a while people get tired of not being discovered and give up in their dream, which leads their social media presence into a downward spiral or poor grammar and embarrassing choices.

I'm not trying to single out those one or two specific people, because I'm sure they are far from the only people who have embarrassing Twitter feeds. I'm just not sure I would want a record of all the stupid things I thought when I was 17 available for all the world to read. My main worry is that people have started to be lulled into a false sense of security just because their Twitter feed doesn't have a million followers. Unless your account is private someone doesn't need to be a follower to read everything you write. Every now and again they should be reminded that while all it takes for internet fame is for the right person to like what your wrote, all it takes to achieve all the wrong kinds of internet notoriety is for the wrong person to stumble upon your Twitter feed while Googling an unrelated subject and decide to make you their cause. (If you don't believe me, just ask the guy from Reddit I was telling you about last week who Gawker decided to unmask.) Just because you can tell the world what you are thinking the second you the thought enters your mind, it doesn't mean you have to. All I'm saying is that sometimes it's ok to keep things to yourself.