Sunday, July 27, 2014

Public people

Good for job, unidentified public-ish person. It is inevitable for many people to do this. I have essentially done this with FB and Twitter. I have 34 FB friends (you twice), and a couple hundred twitter followers on two accounts.


Had I gone back for grad school it would have been on what you had just done. The theory went, when I graduated a few years ago: there are, as the law has defined and society accepted; public people, limited public people, and private people. With the advent of ubiquitous social media and the self-reviewing nature of social media everyone that participates will split their personas to fit some if not all three of the basic public spheres: public, limited public/private, private.


Newspapers, bloggers, anybody, have/has a right to report on your public life (almost all of it) if you are a politician, public performer, etc, that has accepted a public role. The families of these willing participants often become unwilling participants to some degree.


Newspapers, and employers, media companies, have a right to report about you in a very limited sense if you are the spouse of the SDOT director, or there was a crime at your house, but it pretty much has to stick to that scope.


Newspapers, and employers, media companies, do not have the right to report on a private person. No reporter has the right to randomly pick my name and do a biopic on somebody battling line needles in my rain gutters. We make google blur faces when they map streets.


With that, I started a blog and twitter account just for my anonymous notes on the Seattle City Council District 5's race. It's a public thing that separates me from being any more of a public person than I have to be.

There are people that follow me on this twitter feed that would never follow me on my personal account. I will not disappoint those folks by colliding those worlds.  


@sccd52015


http://sccd52015.blogspot.com


I know, blogs are dead, but they retain a useful and interconnected memory that Facebook and twitter just do not have.

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