Information online: Where does it go?
Nathan published this on 12 February 2012, at 1:09.
A couple of days ago, Mashable posted this link: http://mashable.com/2012/02/09/dad-shoots-laptop-facebook/. The article is about a guy, a father of a 15 year old girl. His daughter posted a typical teenage angst post to her friends, complaining about how her parents made her do everything and wouldn’t give her her own way, blah blah blah. Her father saw this (apparently, it was the second time he has seen this kind of post) and, after punishing her the first time, decided to publicly humiliate her. He took his gun, her laptop, a chair and a video camera, and recorded himself giving a monologue to camera in the middle of a field, answering her post to camera, then shooting her laptop, before posting the video onto YouTube.
Within two days, his video went from 5,000 hits to 15 million. He has had numerous media requests (which no doubt will not die down for a couple of weeks) and has made many posts on the subject. Mashable then released this article just a few hours ago: http://mashable.com/2012/02/11/dad-addresses-facebook-laptop-shooting/. They have a slideshow of images on there, all of posts that have been made by the father. But the last post struck me the hardest.
What about all of the information we post? This guy posted the video and received 15,000,000 views, plus numerous offers of talk shows and interviews, but the damage that video can cause could be more dangerous than he may realise, and he has to live with the ramifications and the consequences of that video forever. So what about our posts? What about our content? Our videos, our comments, our statuses, our tweets, photos … we have to live with those. Who knows what can happen because of that. One tweet that is mistimed or misinterpreted or blown out of all proportions could cause a lot of damage to us. Sometimes, it is only intended as a rant (take the guy who was arrested for tweeting about his flight being cancelled due to snow, for example), but it can cause serious problems.
I guess what I am getting at is we need to watch what we post online. People can see our posts and the trouble we can get into from them sometimes is just not worth it.