Putting thoughts on the internet can sometimes lead to a life of being sorry.
The global village means that your tweets or random musings on a blog get broadcast around the world. Most of the time, you can’t un-ring the bell.
Employees need to be mindful of this when ranting against their employers. It is one thing to kvetch to your spouse over dinner. It is quite a different matter to go viral with it.
We have heard this before and we try to warn our kids to practice safe texting, but this is not just a problem for the young and naive among the citizen media corps.
Mainstream media organizations have challenges dealing with errors on internet news sites. Print versions of newspapers and magazines can issue corrections that reach most of the readers of the original story. How does a correction get distributed fairly in new media?
It is much tougher to counter false impressions left by factual errors in an internet environment. Although corrections may be added to a revised version of the original story, most readers don’t return.
A variety of degrees of a common problem – how do you retract what you wish you had not said?
How do you un-ring the bell?
This reminds me of the messaging system named FirstClass (for Macs). You could undo sending an email. I spotted something like that … I think in a current webmail system.
Remember, the internet doesn't forget. When it comes to the Internet Archive this is a good thing. Otherwise, post anonymously.