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The Snoop Next Door Is Posting to YouTube
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Your most trivial missteps are increasingly ripe for exposure online, reports the Wall Street Journal, thanks to cheap cameras and entrepreneurs hoping to profit from websites devoted to the exposure. From the article: 'The most trivial missteps by ordinary folks are increasingly ripe for exposure as well. There is a proliferation of new sites dedicated to condemning offenses ranging from bad parking and leering to littering and general bad behavior. One site documents locations where people have failed to pick up after their dogs. Capturing newspaper-stealing neighbors on video is also an emerging genre. Helping drive the exposés are a crop of entrepreneurs who hope to sell advertising and subscriptions.' But other factors are at work, including a return to shame as a check on social behavior, says an MIT professor."
You don't see a problem? The problem is How long does someone have to be ashamed for, and in front of how many people? You put something on the internet and potentially it's there forever and can be seen by millions, like with Star Wars Kid. I believe forgiveness is necessary in society - being allowed to learn from your mistakes and move on to become a better person - but we seem to have a culture where nobody forgives and nobody is allowed to forget. The people doing the uploading, who feel the need to shame and humliate someone this much, must be pretty unpleasant themselves.
I guess I don't think like you, not anymore.
A few years ago one warm summer day, I got fuming mad at some woman who was going rather slow, worrying about something inside her station wagon and could not decide on a lane. I remember this vividly. Latter, honest to god, I saw her checking out at K-Mart. She was buying gatoraide for some reason and chatting with the clerk. She started crying. It turns out she had just moved to the city where I live, someone had stolen her pocket book, she could not find it in here car and she was having a really bad day. I made it a point to apologize for my behavior when we were both driving, cause you see, I was the real asshole.
You don't walk in these peoples shoes, please don't arbitrarily demonize them. Nobody ever gets to know anyone these days. I guess we are to busy hiding behind our gadgets. Really, how well do you know your neighbor? It's easy to judge someone badly, it's a little harder to get to know your fellow humans and see them for what the are, human. People are not just an inconvenience in your self-absorbed little world. Yea, I know, it's scary to say "hello, how are you, I'm such-and-such..." but you'll feel better if you truly live and let live.