COMMENT | This is not a private site. Let’s say it again. As cozy as it may feel, as much as it can be as a small community, the Internet is not a private place.
Jessica Bibbs found out when, she says, she was fired over a Facebook post.
Bibbs, upset that he didn’t receive a promotion, wrote a rant on Facebook. She was later fired, reports AZFamily.com, though her employer denies the station was the only reason.
So the internet isn’t all that new anymore. Even Facebook has been around long enough for people to understand that just because your settings are “private,” the word doesn’t mean you can’t go back. It appears that several of Bibbs’ assistants were his Facebook friends, so the news frenzy didn’t go far.
All corners of our lives are becoming more and more private, but no life is as public as life into the public Now, that sounds obvious, but people seem to forget that the Internet, as a whole, is a public place.
Here at Yahoo! But Aeneas himself, in the street. Absolutely anyone who comes across this block can see what I’m saying and see your response to it. Most people recognize the public nature of a public website like this one.
But the problem comes when we think of a site like Facebook as our corner animals, with admission by invitation only. It’s not.
It’s more like a restaurant. You can limit who’s at your table, sure, but you can’t really control what happens at the other table, and it’s very easy to overhear.
You cannot discount the human compulsion to gossip. Although our Facebook visitors are referred to as “friends”, many, especially those people who count friends in the high hundreds, are best known; strangers for not discriminating.
That takes you right out of the restaurant and back onto the public street.
Even in a restaurant, although most people are careful what they say. You don’t know who is in the booth behind you, or who you know.
Which brings us back to where we came from. So they can feel your Facebook connection your connections as your private Internet cave, where the echo is heard by no one but the sea, but not so To make matters worse, remarks which, if made in conversation at dinner, might have been dismissed by angry talkers, are now being recorded.
I can’t say if Bibbs deserved to be fired. Actually, I can’t even say, just her post on Facebook that led to her release. All I can say is, let’s all be careful what we throw out there in the interwebs, because we never know when we’ll get caught in it.
