Epic blogular fail

I actually had two half-written posts I had been working on. Regrettably, in blog-land, two half-posts don't add up to a whole one. They have now sat so long, it's pointless to try to bring them back out and finish them up. I'll just give a brief summary, and let it go at that as I move on to coming attractions.

One post was a reaction to Facebook's privacy policy change. ("Which one?!?" asks the Peanut Gallery.) I was idly musing that, back in the mid-1908s or so, you could (mostly) only send email to other people on the same online service: Compuserve? Delphi? GEnie? All separate. We're in kind of a similar place with social networking today: Facebook? LinkedIn? Orkut? Yahoo 360? (OK, sorry, I'm obviously getting snarky there.) My point is, nobody hands you an email address and worries about who your ISP is. Maybe eventually we'll have a more open, distributed social networking architecture, and we won't be as beholden to one provider as we are now with Facebook. (To the extent that we are.) But I have no clever ideas, just wondering.

The other basically made the non-newsworthy point that people have always been able to do stupid things in front of their home town. Now they can do stupid things for the entire world. Though it's by no means the only example, I was inspired by the Lower Merion Webcam Debacle. Lower Merion is local for me, literally the next town over in a densely-populated suburban area where you can go from Township A to Township B without even noticing that you passed through Townships X and Y on the way. As a Lower Merion High School student from my congregation posted on her Facbook account, "Way to go, LM... we're in the news in AUSTRALIA."

Again, this is not news. I just wonder when this comes into play. Clearly some government official in Idaho can't make a decision based on what they think people in Maine will think. But at some point, it seems, it would become obvious that you're contemplating something controversial, and you have to ask yourself if you really want to put your name and your employers' name behind defending it in public. News flash: the days of "Well, nobody will notice" are over.

Photo credit: Sharon Drummond via flickr.com