(Source: wbotd)
Tornado Video of the Day: Navarro County emergency management coordinator Eric Meyers captured some striking footage of this morning’s home-demolishing tornado as it passed through Rice, Texas.
He wants everyone to know that they are in the Tornado. Also those cars are just commuting to work like there isnt a a house being torn apart
Employer: Why are you late Bill?
Bill: I had to dodge a house on the interstate
“…their iniquities shall be spoken upon the housetops, and their secret acts shall be revealed”
D&C 1:3
We live in an age where social security and privacy venues are becoming less of a refuge and more of a public display. New media devices, especially the Internet and its vast array of search engines and social-networking sites, have made it so virtually anyone can look up our information in a matter of seconds. Should we be a sex-offender, people will know it. Should we be a tax-violator, a thief, a plagiarizer, a “drunken-pirate,” or an innocent blogger posting about his or her wild shenanigans late Friday evening, people will know it. Because the Internet seems to record all of our deeds and forget none of our flaws, many embarrassing personal revelations have come back to haunt certain folk who have tried to erase their digital identities from the career market. Stacy Snyder, a 25-year old teacher at Conestoga Valley High School in Lancaster, PA was fired from her job four years ago after posting a drunken picture of herself on MySpace. She sued the school on grounds of violating her First Amendment rights, but lost after months of litigation because the picture promoted behavior contrary to her public employee status. In a digital age that has enough power to publically tarnish our reputation, pose threats to our privacy, jeopardize our future vocations, and reject us because of unbecoming information found online, the question of what kind of faces we are presenting to the world is one then that surely needs meditating upon.
Four years ago when the Library of Congress announced that it would be permanently storing the entire archive of public Twitter feeds/posts, it became evident that celebrities would no longer remain alone in the limelight of public scrutiny, but would be joined by billions of others with perhaps equally checkered pasts. The fact that the Internet makes us all vulnerable to having our secret acts revealed poses, as Jeffery Rosen suggests, an existential crisis on our ability to control and reinvent ourselves anew. It shackles us and records every unflattering thing we post, like photos and discussion board conversations and membership in controversial groups; thus making repentance, at least for some of us, a severely difficult task. Think of those who try to sell enhanced or idealized versions of themselves online, and who post things which initially seem innocuous but later come back to bite. Should the Stacy Synder’s of the world be given “the right to new-beginnings and self-definition”? Should society forgive drunken Facebook pictures, even those that belong to the President of the United States? Surely one would think so, for as Viktor Mayer-Schönberger puts it, “without some form of forgetting, forgiving becomes a difficult undertaking.”
The penalties enforced should never thwart a person’s ability to change and evolve; after all, we can hardly judge a stranger based upon his or her blogging posts alone. People are complex. We need to spend time with them, get to know their strengths and weaknesses, and remove ourselves as much as possible from making sweeping claims. All this to the contrary, however, the Internet is becoming more and more a place of voyeurism and exhibitionism—a permanent memory bank that stores everything libelous and saintly, holy and profane. Our deeds, whether they be good or bad, can’t be hidden forever; they will eventually slip through the luminous cracks of computer technology and expose us for who we really are.
