Once upon a time you could go out in public and, if you were not actually famous for something, have a reasonable expectation of privacy. These days, where six of any ten people in any room have a digital camera in their pocket, anything you do can be filmed and posted online. And there is nothing you can do to pull it back.
The only choice is to actually behave in a responsible, adult manner any time you go outside. As your mother said, be careful what you do because anything untoward can come back and bite you in the ass.
I’ve been toying with this idea for a while, finally polishing it into a reasonable argument here, at Crosscut.
On the other hand, there must be another option, since behaving yourself seems like an extreme reaction.
While a reporter was usually exempt from dealing with anything as undignified as self-promotion, today we must do anything to get people to read our stuff. Comments–intelligent ones, at least–have become the coin of the realm. So to get to the point, I invite you to read and react. We are redefining the rules, so it could turn out that begging for comments in this way turns out to be inappropriate for some journalistic reason.
In the meantime, let’s see if we can get anything started.
