The classic definition of gotcha journalism usually refers to an interview style where the interviewer tries to trap the interviewee into saying something that would be damaging to themselves or their cause.  It has been around since the early 80s and became firmly rooted into our political and popular culture since then.

With the rise of the Internet, journalists, bloggers and citizens have taken gotcha journalism to new levels.  The barrier to entry is much lower:  instead of having to secure an interview with someone in order to trap the interviewee, the new breed of gotcha journalism uses the Internet to sift through all of the statements that a person has made in their entire life to try to paint them in a bad light.

Now, bloggers go through politicians’ every public statement for any misspeak or inaccuracy and then try to crucify them.  It started with John Kerry being labeled a “flip-flopper,” moved to George Bush‘s butchering of the English language and more recently, led President Obama’s Green Energy Czar to quit because of statements he made almost ten years ago.  When President Obama misspoke on the campaign trail, saying that he had visited all 57 states, right wing bloggers tried to make it seem like Obama was stupid.  When Sarah Palin burst onto the national scene, left wing bloggers and some in the media sifted through her previous public statements to search for any inaccuracy.

It seems like 75% of the news stories I read about each day have to do with some politician getting raked over the coals for some statement he just made that is different from a statement he made a long time ago.  Many times, the person leveling the charge is a fellow politician, along with the media and the blogosphere.

My generation is the first generation to be online from an early age.  We first interacted with email, then instant messaging, then social networks and now blogs.  We created (and are still creating) vast amounts of data about ourselves, much of which is stored online.  We have archived AIM conversations from when we were in 6th grade,  digital pictures from high school and college that are online and we all have our dumb Facebook wall posts that we made throughout our college years.

Many of us have blogs on wordpress or blogger and many more have microblogging accounts on services like Twitter where we make observations and pithy comments about our daily lives.  I know I’ve changed alot since I was in 6th grade and I assume I will change almost as much between now and the end of the 2010s.  During the next decade, as people in my generation get older and become leaders in business, politics and culture, will we still be subjected to gotcha journalism like our public figures are today?

One argument is that since everyone has all of this content online, we will become desensitized to people’s dumb or incorrect statements from when they were young.  Everyone has pictures of themselves on Facebook that they wished never made it online.  Everyone is going to have a poorly thought out wall post that could be taken out of context, or a pithy remark on Twitter that does not stand the test of time.  Anyone who blogs about anything interesting will be majorly wrong about something.  Will millennials become bored by the new gotcha journalism because everyone has something online that could make them look bad?

On the other hand, millennials may just make gotcha journalism even worse than it is today.  Since everyone has created gigabytes of online content, bloggers and the media will have an easier time digging up dirt on anyone who enters the public eye.  Imagine being able to see the new candidate for Governor at a boozy college party or getting a transcript of his AIM conversations with his best friend or girlfriend from high school.  The media, bloggers and most of all, the citizens will eat this stuff up.  Ratings will go up and everyone will be happy, execpt for the public feature.

I hope that my generation helps start the shift away from gotcha journalism.  I can’t imagine being shocked by the vast majority of the dirt that someone would dig up about a public figure online.  I hope that millennials are willing to allow people to change their opinion and not be called a flip-flopper.  I hope we will cut public figures some slack when their college photos get published to the major blogs and their old blog posts come back to haunt them.  I’m not optimistic, but I am hopeful.  If not, we will have some really boring politicians, business leaders and public figures!

Do you think millenials will help stop gotcha journalism or do you think the problem will get worse?

                          

After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic. Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense?

Reading it now, the first part seems like it has to be an Onion article.  While most are laughable now, I don’t want to focus on what he got wrong.  Here’s a quick taste of some of Clifford Stoll‘s predictions from 1995:

• “The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper”
• “No computer network will change the way government works”
• “You can’t tote that laptop to the beach”
• “We’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.”
• We won’t be able to find the information we want
• The Internet won’t be useful in government
• Computers in schools? “Bah. These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training.”
• “We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.”

He was clearly wrong about pretty much everything in the first section of the article, but I think he gets the second part partially correct:

What’s missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who’d prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where–in the holy names of Education and Progress–important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.

I think he was right that ultimately, online connections are indeed “limp substitutes” for the real thing, but he missed that the Internet could help people make connections with people they never would have had the chance to meet in their non-Internet lives.  I’ve made connections with people though my blog, facebook, twitter and other networks like Brazen Careerist, who I never would have run across if I weren’t online.

This article brings up another interesting issue.  People love this article now because Stoll was so wrong about so many things.  How will people in my generation look 15 years from now?  We have created huge amounts of content on blogs and social networks, much more than previous generations.  Much of this content contains strong options.

Surely many of us will be as wrong as Stoll was in his Newsweek article.  In 1995, Stoll’s article was fairly reasonable.  He was well informed, involved in the industry and took a strong stand on an issue he believe in.  Unfortunately, today it looks ridiculous.  There is no way Stoll could run for office and win.  His opponent would have more fun than Republicans who make fun of Al Gore for “inventing the internet.”

If an informed stakeholder can get something so wrong, isn’t it likely that most of us will probably write something that will be completely wrong 15 years down the road?  Will articles like these preclude us from running for office?  How about getting a job?  Should we be worried about how history will view our blog posts?

Like unflattering pictures posted online, I hope that blog posts that history proves to be wrong are forgiven.   As long as the posts were well written, logical and thought out, posts where we are wrong should not count against us.  Knee-jerk reactions or Glenn Beckesque rants SHOULD be held against the writer.  If not, we will have some boring future leaders who weren’t even willing to take a stand when they were young!

                          

It seems like I hear about another story like this every day and I can’t seem to figure out why.  When the Internet first starting becoming popular in the late 90s, it was not uncommon to hear about people being fired for looking at porn at the office, buying illegal items over the Internet or trying to meet up with underage children.  I chalked that up to stupid people bringing their shady offline behavior to the Internet and not understanding that the Internet is basically public.   I figured that people did not realize that pretty much anyone could find out about what they were doing since the Internet was new.

Fast forward to 2009.  It’s been a decade since people started to become familiar with the Internet.  Everyone in the United States should have heard hundreds of these stories in the last ten years.  It wouldn’t surprise me if most Americans know at least one person personally who has done something stupid online that has led to adverse consequences.  Why does it continue to happen and why are people who slap videos up on YouTube shocked when they are discovered?  Why do people have a sense of anonymity and privacy with the Internet, when in reality, the Internet is probably the least private place in the world?

Why do underage drinkers post pictures of themselves on Facebook for the police or school officials to find when they would not post those pictures on their lockers?  Why do teens send nude pictures of themselves to their classmates over their cellphones or on Facebook when they would never give pass around a hard copy?  Why do grown men go to chat rooms and try to proposition children and go to meet them, even after the popularity of Chris Hansen’s To Catch A Predator, when they would never approach a child on the street (or even on the phone) with the same advances?  Why do people post rants on their Facebook or Twitter pages when they would never put the same information into a newspaper or say it to the person’s face?  Why do people do illegal things and post them on Youtube or Facebook video when they would never send them to their local news station?  Why do people post all sorts of things online that they would be mortified to do in real life?  Why are they shocked when they are caught?

I truly don’t understand it.  They have to know better.  They have to have seen examples of people getting into trouble for posting things online.  I cannot figure out why people have a sense of anonymity online when in reality it is the exact opposite.

I think about 20% of the people who do these types of things are just stupid.  They are equivalent to the guy who walks into the grocery store and waits for an employee to walk by, then shoves a frozen turkey under his coat.  They just don’t get it.  There is another 5-10% of people who just want to be “YouTube famous” and will post just about anything to be popular.  There is no helping these people.

My hypothesis for the rest of the population is that people who are posting these types of things online are generally alone, in their office or their home, and are lulled into a false sense of security.  They think that they are alone at home, so how can anyone else see what they are doing?  I don’t think that they are crying out for help or trying to get caught.  I think there is something about the isolation that is caused by computers and the internet that gives people the idea that they being private and careful, when in fact, it is the exact opposite.  They view the Internet as their own personal world, without regard to the rest of the people who happen to inhabit their virtual world as well.

I wonder if this is the height of the problem and history will look back at 2003-2009 as the crazy years when people were naive about the Internet, posting whatever they wanted and doing whatever they wanted, without regard to the consequences.  It could also go the other way, where everyone becomes desensitized to the stupid things people do online, but I do not think so.

Help me understand.  What’s your hypothesis as to why people slap pictures on Facebook and videos on YouTube that can get them in trouble? Why do so many people have a sense of anonymity online?  Will it continue?

                          

I’ve seen seven Facebook statuses in the last 10 minutes bemoaning the fact that gmail is down.  It just reminds me how much we are all dependent on Google and of one of my favorite South Park Episodes, Over Logging.  Since you can’t work without access to email, you might as well go outside and enjoy the beautiful weather, or check out the South Park episode.

                          

I trust Google with my life….almost. I have my email, calendar, documents, contacts, advertising campaign, photos and website analytics all in Google’s hands. I use Google maps to find out where I am going (google maps), view business reviews (search), and upload and view videos (youtube). I get my news in part from Google News. I used to use blogger, another Google service, to host my blog, but have since moved to hosting my own site on a wordpress platform. Google is so much more than a search engine and millions of people around the world trust google to protect and store their important data. Google Creep, as I like to call it, is Google’s amazing ability to become useful, if not necessary, to our daily lives.

I’ve never been one to put all of my eggs in one basket, but I realized I pretty much have with google. In the unlikely event of Google’s bankruptcy, failure due to hacking or natural disaster, I would be pretty much screwed. I bet millions of others would be in my shoes, too. Its amazing that we have not only allowed a company to permeate our entire lives as much as Google has, but we have embraced it, always asking for Google to do more.

Google is now pushing into electronic medical records, mobile phones and even renewable energy. It will be interesting to see if there is any backlash in the coming years about how much we depend on Google. As people move from hard drives toward storage on the internet, more and more people will become dependent on Google.

After I got my internet connection back up, I backed up all of my contacts and google docs onto my hard drive, which is backed up by Mozy. This is not an anti-google post and I doubt anything bad will happen to Google, but it was shocking to find how dependent I had become on Google and its services. I probably won’t change anything, but its pretty amazing. I can’t think of any other company that took over like Google has in the history of America.

What do you think? Are you as dependent on Google as I am? Do you have any strategies to combat Google creep as it takes over even more facets of our online lives? Do you think it is a bad thing?

                          

Instead of spending billions (literally) of dollars developing black boxes that can resist 5,000 degree heat, impact of the highest magnitudes, and can send radio transponder signals from depths of 12,000 feet below sea level for up to 30 days, someone should have suggested the possibility of a solution that lies outside the black box.

Why can’t black boxes transmit their data in real time to a backup station via the internet or cell phone transponder?  It seems like it would be a fairly simple engineering project, but it has not been done yet.  Hopefully some engineer is working on this project right now and works harder and faster because of the recent Air France crash.  It would seem like this idea would be something that both the government and the airlines would love to have.

                          

The boy’s aunt and mother appealed to parliement and the Prime Minister, but they were unable to help get the boy back.  Fast forward to 2009.  The boy’s aunt googled his name and the first hit was his Facebook page.  They sent him a message and a phone number and waited.  After two weeks, he messaged back and he was able to be reunited with his mother.

This story shows the incredible power of the Internet and social networks in general.  Its not to see a story in the media about some of the benefits of social networks, rather than stories about the dangers.  I wonder how many other missing children are on Facebook without their parents’ knowledge?

                          

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