It is amazing what stuff people will put on the internet… whether it is a simple web site, an email or — as we have recently discovered in the Foley case — an instant message.
Recently, top GOOGLE executives “warn politicians of internet power.” The article opens with the provocative statement :
“Imagine being able to check instantly whether or not statements made by politicians were correct. That is the sort of service Google Inc. boss Eric Schmidt believes the Internet will offer within five years.”
Has the world come to this? Politicians that HAVE TO tell the truth??!! Sheeeesh….
Telling the truth is just good business, good for relationships and an excellent way to develope healthy bonds within a family and between people. This does not mean being untactful… as in… “yes, hun, those pants really do bring out the whale in you!” What it means is telling the truth…. don’t exaggerate… don’t evade or avoid… just say what you mean and mean what you say. It may seem difficult at first, but as it becomes habit…well… it is the only way to live and life becomes so much less complicated this way.
INTERNET SEARCHES
I remember once I gave a political speech and an eager beaver reporter decided to see what dirt he could find out on me… so he asked me about myself, primarily to see if he could ‘catch me’ in a lie. Soon I recieved a phone call that he had discovered I was a fraud… a trickster!…. a scoundrel! Hmmmm…. how’d he figure that out sooo fast?
What the Tribune reporter had done is call the then Los Angeles Rams and see if anyone remembered me… no one did, but then I was part of the ‘great forgetables’ that pass through athletic turnstiles each year…. besides, it wasn’t the receptionists fault anyway… it was her first day. Today, he could have zipped along the internet and found me. He busted a gut, but he did apologize.
EMAILS
My wife sued Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and over 1000 documents — mostly emails — were used in setting up her case written between 1991 – 1999 … it still amazes me what people write in a medium that is not confidential. Too many people look at emails as coversation and forget they are evidentiary. Let’s just say that the emails were enough to turn even a hardened stomach … and the university settled seven years ago.
What amazed me most about Laura’s experience was how so many basically ‘good people’ could go so wrong. Philip Zombardo did a ground breaking experiment years ago placing Stanford Students into two groups — prisoners and guards — and over time watched as they morphed into everyone’s worst nightmare.
Today he has a new book entitled: THE LUCIFER EFFECT: Understanding how good people turn evil. The book costs about $18 not including postage and provides a real insight into the evil that can be seduced and rewarded even in the best of us.
WEB SITES / Instant messaging
What can and can not be placed on web sites and in blogs is continuing to be a point of discussion. Where does the rights of an organization stop and an individual’s free speech begin? Here are a couple of today’s articles in the Daily Trojan on a couple of aspects:
New facebook Stalkers: YOUR parents?
Parents are taking more of an ‘inspect what you expect’ approach to watching their ‘adult children’… especially if mommy and daddy are still paying the bills. Parents just want to know what they are paying for.
Students Ignore web danger at their peril
The jist of this:
“In the meantime, students should be aware that the Internet is and always has been a public space, and anything that crosses its connections could end up on the news tonight.”
Here’s some sites you may not have seen:
“SETAC ASTRONOMY”
In a Robert Redford movie in which he actually looked young entitled ‘SNEAKERS”, someone invented a code breaking device that unlocked all codes… the code name was ‘Setac Astronomy’ which incorporates all the letters needed to spell out something like… ‘No More Secrets.”
Today, secrets can still exist… even within the C.I.A. (sometimes)… but with the internet, ‘secrets’ can be leaked from whistle blowers at Eron or displayed by Drudge’s popular Report introducing America to our favorite cigar maiden Monika Lewinsky…. it’s hard for the good old boys and girls to keep a lid on bad news. Gosh, I guess they thought that no one would ever know.
Thanks to the internet, the world is becoming more open, freer and more data can be reviewed by the average person.
Information is power.
Roger Freberg
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What is it with these rich guys?
I don’t always read the local paper the San luis Obispo Tribune very often… I really — as they say — don’t care who turned 100, what shrub is now endangered or how green which politician is… once in a while a story or two pops up that says… IDIOT!
History is resplendent with artifacts that help us better understand what life was like in bygone days. The object to the left looks like a chair… but it isn’t. It is a ‘chamber horse.’