Scared of Your Own Words?

RedCedar writes "James Rutt, the CEO of Network Solutions has deleted all of his postings from the Well, apparently for fear of having some of them used against him in news stories. The Washington Post has this story on it. " Regardless of who it is, this is an interesting trend, I think perpuated by The Media in general of focusing on the person. Do you think this will become a more regular occurence? Am I going to have to wipe my own comments? *grin*

Anonymity good, AC's bad.

I agree entirely: access to anonymous forms of communication seems to me an essential freedom of a democratic society. Ideally, of course, people should be able to speak in their own name without fear of State comeback, but if that freedom is threatened you might need anonymity to know about it.

However, anonymity is not about having no identity: it is about having more than one identity. Superman is anonymous because no-one knows he's also Clark Kent, but it's clear that the guy who rescued the school bus yesterday is the same guy who stopped the nuclear terrorists last week; it's just not known that he's the same guy as wrote the story about the kitten hospital on Tuesday. That's why I don't respect AC's: it's not that they don't give their real names, but that they don't give any name at all: every comment is a "hit and run" comment, and there's no point in responding because even if you hear from them again you won't know about it. I think Slashdot should abolish ACs in favour of special anonymous accounts that don't need a valid email address to be enabled, for the best of both worlds.

For my part, I use my real, legal name. I now wish I hadn't - I'd rather not be *quite* as out as I am about, for example, SM - but I'm known by this name online now and I'm not inclined to change it. But I'd certainly encourage anyone who's started using online public forums recently to come up with a pseudonym (not a silly one, a straightforward one you can live with for a long time) and use it as a matter of course. Who the hell needs to know your real name anyway?
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Never use your real name -- Be a coward!

Such NONSENSE!!!!!!!!!

I have had an online presense since the 1980s, and have always known that things that I say or that I have said could or would be archived and still around years and even decades later. You never know who might be archiving a USENET newsgroup, or even just messages from you.

I comport my life in that I tend to say what I mean, and mean what I say (and Humpty Dumpty points out that these aren't always the same things!). My opinions may change over the years, but I have rarely said things in public forums that I am sorry for having said... if my views have changed over time, then it's documentation of a learning process!

In the unlikely event that somebody would find such a change in my personal opinions, and would take the effort to try to use my own words against me, my response would be to point out that EVEN *I* CAN MANAGE TO CHANGE MY MIND AND (get this!) evolve better opinions!

For those people who may find themselves ashamed for things that they may have said a few years ago, my feeling is "well... it's your own fault if you said such things in a public forum."

Speaking on USENET, on a "community bulletin board," on Slashdot, or in any other public online forum, is the same as talking to a reporter for a newspaper. Whatever you say will be still be around years later... even after you die (there are newspaper "morgues" that go back many decades!).

The moral is: think before you speak. And most important: Think about the legacy you are leaving behind! I think I am proud of my legacy... even the things that I have done in the past that turned out to be incorrect. After all, everything has contributed in my being the person that is me right now.

But then again, maybe I won't feel this way in a year or so. If not, in the words of Emily Litella, "Never mind!"
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Re:mass scribbling on the WELL

I'm the co-host of the News conference on the Well, where Jim's mass-scribble was discussed and John Schwartz picked up on it and wrote the WPost article. I've known Jim since he started on the Well a decade ago, and think it's perfectly fine for him to do this, and said so at the time. At my request and others, though he was under no obligation to do so, he briefly mentioned his viewpoint on this. Frankly, it's his own damn business as it should be for anyone on the Well. That's the way it has to be if you really "own your own words."

bandy, booter, blair and now jimrutt are not the only ones to do this over the years, and the reasons and context have been discussed extensively. My guess is that many Well members are uneasy about cases like this but support the right of anyone to do so. On the other side, a few have been vehement about the damage to the flow of discussion (and by inference, to the sense of community) that wholesale removal of postings causes, particularly in topics where the person has been quite active. But my feeling has always been, if you can scribble one posting for whatever reason (and nobody I know of questions that feature), then why shouldn't you be able to do that to all of your postings if you so desire?

jef deserves credit for providing a tool that both makes this more convenient to the user and diminishes the impact on other users.

As for jimrutt, alert Slashdot readers know that I have been quite critical of NSI both before and since he came on board. We've tangled over a number of issues over the years on the Well, but once you look at how he thinks and acts and presents his views (modulo the obvious shit-disturbing comments!), he has genuine integrity. I was not happy with the tripartite agreements announced last week between NSI, ICANN and the Department of Commerce: I think Commerce gave away the store to NSI. But I can't fault Jim for reaching an agreement that is as favorable as he could get for his company. When he first took the job I urged him to focus on dropping the whois database intellectual property claims, and instead get with fixing NSI's obviously broken customer service. To a large degree he is doing that; I'm still not happy with NSI but we have what we have. If the ongoing NSI/ICANN/open registry system can sustain Jon Postel's vision of the net as a resource freely and fairly available to all people, then Jim's professional activities will be vindicated.

But regardless of that, he had the perfect right to scribble his stuff on the Well. Or not.

If y'all are interested in checking out the rather unique place known as the Well [well.com], please come check it out. There are both graphical (Engaged) and command-line (picospan) user interfaces, and a lot of ferment in our conferences, and though it's not quite the hotbed of whatever that we used to be, it's still something of a lab of social online interaction.

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The media doesn't have a sense of humor.

You say one thing sarcastically or in jest and the media is all over you. They will misquote you and argue over your words till the day hell freezes over. Everyone will get up in arms and then you'll have to backtrack on everything you said.

Example: The new biography of Ronald Reagan is out, and in it the biographer called him an "apparent airhead". For the last two weeks all I've seen interviews was "OOh! You called him an airhead!" "You called him an airhead!". Reagan's whole family has denounced the biography over just that one word.

Example: Just in the paper today there was a short article on Eric Idle and Monty Python. He was quoted as saying "I have discovered I really don't mind doing Monty Python, providing none of the others are around", and at the end of the article they had to mention one of Idle's spokespeople saying he was really just trying to be funny.

Example: Jesse Ventura. That wacky governor of Minnesota has gotten into way too much trouble trying to be funny. Remember how he said he wanted to be reincarnated as a 36DD Bra? How he thinks religion is for weak minded people? He's had to backtrack for the entire time he's in office over some of the stuff he's said.

Nobody has a sense of humor, and frankly, I'd be afraid to have any of my old messages show up if I became a public figure. Geek humor is very strange, and very difficult to understand, and waay too easy to take seriously. I like to tell dead baby jokes, call people idiots, and be an all around misanthrope/misogynist. I would be dead meat if some of my old messages popped up and the media got it's hands on them.

My solution for old emails and usenet posts

First I have a work email and a home email, admittedly a weak subterfuge.

Then, if someone corners me about an old post, I'll look it over, with a puzzled expression on my face, and finally say.

"Dude, I wrote that? I must have been blitzed on some serious 'cid at the time, whoa!"

George

Where does it all lead to?

It is both understandable and sad to see that things like this happen. Indeed, the media tends to take things out of context and make a story even out of slight remarks. Worse, some people's comments indeed are getting used against them.

However, on the other hand is the point that people should think before the speak. Quite often that is the core of the problems. Especially when you are a figure of power, high standing, or just well-known, it is important to be careful with what you say or write, because of course people will interpret things, and quote you on what you say. If you have thoughts you wish to express, but you don't want them to be thrown back at you as in 'You said ...' then don't say them :-)

So if people would take a bit more accountability into consideration when writing things, or when giving interviews or speeches, etc... And if the media could perhaps stick a bit more to reporting rather than scandal and headline hunting, things would look alot better.

Sounds like the hopes of a dreamer, right?

Anonymity

This is one of the reasons why the ability to be anonymous on the Internet is important. Semi-public figures like Rutt should be allowed to communicate in a public forum on a personal level without having his every utterance scrutinized by a ruthless media and public.

As far the "Media" focusing on individuals is concerned, I think that this is something that we all do. It is easier for us as individuals to focus on specific individuals. In regard to bands, for instance, people tend to focus their attention on the vocalist as an individual, even if the band is truly a collective effort.

Re:Eagles may soar...

Eagles are visible. Weasles can get stepped on.

<optimism>

This does make me wonder: how long will it be before someone turns the openness of their opinions into an asset? If the media try to spin some comment out of context it could easily backfire if that entire context is available for the asking; the publication or reporter who tried this might wind up zeroing their own credibility. And imagine what might happen if the public starts using the Net as a way to check on the views of candidates. Who's going to be more "real" to a discerning electorate: someone who's been on the record for years, or someone whose carefully-tailored platform appeared ex nihilo on their campaign web site last week?

</optimism><normal_cynicism>

"Discerning electorate"? What was I thinking. Never mind!
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Deja Moo: The feeling that

mass scribbling on the WELL

Mass scribbling on the WELL is a peculiar institution. It started years ago when Bandy and his then wife Booter were being harassed by one of the WELL's mad dogs. Bandy wrote a somewhat baroque C program to find all their posts, emit scribble commands, and execute them. Then they made an unexpected discovery - due to a bug in the conferencing software, each topic where they had scribbled a post would show up as "new" for all readers, even though there were no actual new responses. That morning, every reader in every conference was having to hit return hundreds of times to make their way through a whole lot of nothing. There was an outcry, of course. I believe that the WELL's prejudice against mass scribbling is really due to this stupid bug, not to any lofty considerations of conversational integrity. Blair Newman's mass scribble followed shortly after Bandy and Booter's. I'm pretty sure he did it just for fun, to try out a new techno toy, and it was not related to his suicide a few weeks later. However, those who were still pissed at Bandy & Booter naturally seized upon the suicide as an opportunity to paint mass scribbling as evil or something. The WELL is like that sometimes. The peculiar thing was that in order to make this rhetorical connection, Blair had to be retroactively sanctified. So, a lot of the folks who harassed him while he was alive - including the same person who was harassing Bandy and Booter - were now praising Blair. Very strange to see. In the years since then, the original motive - protection from a harasser - has been the most common reason for mass scribbling. Jim's use for pre-emptive political protection is a first. By the way, Jim didn't use Bandy's original mass scribble program, he used a later simpler shell script written by me.

Never use your real name

Simply because no matter how clever and wise you think your thoughts are today, they may be regrettable in 20 years. Your views and employers may have changed, but your ASCII scribbles would still be on the wall.

Who knows, maybe the ideology or F word may be out of fashion and make you look like an idiot. Or maybe your writings were never very sombre to start with.

Another good reason is that you don't want to land up in a collected database. Information is always collected. Just check up your name on whowhere.com or similar engines - you may be in for a shock.