It's crazy how people take to media channels with no regards for how the recipient will feel. I guarantee you that 99% of the people writing all of that hateful content would walk right past him if they saw him in the street.
Thinking back decades to the notorious Son of Sam case I remember families with the name berkowitz (his adopted family name) and falco (birth name) telling everybody they had no relation. But all they had to deal with was a few neighbors wondering.
Now the whole world can wonder in just minutes. So all the people who react first and check facts later are multiplied from three neighbors to millions of people you never met.
I mean if you're accidentally labelled as a serial killer of children and it eventually turns out to be your brother who did it, I don't necessarily think that opens you to accepting the consequences of that.
How would you feel if your sibling did something and you received all of the backlash for it?
Following Hurricane Katrina, a small businesswoman who owned a Katrina domain -- I can't remember if it was Katrina.com or Katrina.net -- put up links to hurricane resources. And she still got vilified for being a dirty old cybersquatter, even though she owned the Katrina domain well before the hurrican made the name infamous, when she was just an average person who was lucky enough to score the domain for a relatively common name.
One of the things I find most regrettable about the Internet is the way it surfaces people's tendencies to get outraged first, before all the facts are in.
Kim Davis - I don't even have a good plan for what to do in case of severe earthquake, and we live in Southern California. I certainly don't have a plan for bad events with hit-by-meteor odds, like being wrongly branded as a spree killer by the national news media.
It did occur to me to wonder what would happen to my life if somebody named "Mitch Wagner" became a nationwide villain. Even if I myself weren't implicated, I'm sure it would not be pleasant.
Jewell's story was a sad one. He was a man who desperately wanted to be a cop, but never quite made the grade. While working as a security guard, he performed an act of heroism -- and was, instead, branded a villian (as you note).
His national reputation never completely recovered, but he did get a job as a small-town cop, and by all accounts he was an excellent one. Smalltown police isn't about violence, it's about breaking up barfights, stopping kids from drinking, curbing vandalism, and being a friendly face. He died young in 2007.
I wonder if his reputation would have ended up better or worse if the whole thing happened today.
@Joe - I was surprised that Ryan Lanza took the bus home after learning that he was publicly identified as a mass murderer. I'm glad that he didn't run into anyone who felt the need to take justice into their own hands.
I guess we just none of us have plans for what we'd do in comparable circumstances.
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In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M.
The smartphone market reached a significant milestone, a breakthrough that may cause vendors to celebrate but could strain the capabilities of IT service desks.
In the fall of 2011, around 160,000 students in 190 countries enrolled in a Stanford-sponsored online course about artificial intelligence. About 23,000 completed the course and got certificates, including 248 who got a perfect score. The university offered the same course the old-fashioned way to students sitting in Stanford classrooms. None of the those students got a perfect score.
As Mitch Wagner discussed today, Yahoo is acquiring Tumblr. The big Internet debate at the moment is whether Tumblr will be good or bad for Yahoo. Regardless of their stances on the future of Yahoo itself, many claim that Yahoo will somehow ruin Tumblr.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
Ushering in a new era of cognitive computing systems, IBM announced today the IBM Watson Engagement Advisor, a technology breakthrough that allows brands to crunch big data in record time to transform the way they engage clients in key functions such as customer service, marketing, and sales.
Expert Integrated Systems: Changing the Experience & Economics of IT In this e-book, we take an in-depth look at these expert integrated systems -- what they are, how they work, and how they have the potential to help CIOs achieve dramatic savings while restoring IT's role as business innovator. READ THIS eBOOK
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
