Tag Archive: stupidity


Persistance of Stupidity (The Proof)

A while I scribbled an article on ???persistence or stupidity??? a rough review on the effect of todays internet + a few friends and their ability to capture the moment when you do something really stupid and post it in the internet, youtube.com, epicfail.com, facebook.com is full of such precious gems of entertainment. Mind you it is nothing new, the tabloid press have been making millions of the odd photo or a knickerless or drunken celeb.
I too have various photos (on film, remember that !!) of my mates in our more outrageous years, so I am not immune. But appear to have got of lightly so far.
Not so for some friends of friends of friends on Facebook.com, where photographs of teenagers (just) can be seen smoking, in school uniform on school property. One can only assumed that this level of stupidity will stand them in good stead when they apply for their Darwin award in years to come.

Persistence of stupidity

There is a lot of hype in the media of late about privacy, big brother state, Google street view, state owned data base on phone calls and internet use. There has also been some on social networks and gate crashing parties. But on closer examination there is more in common between state / corporate privacy issues and social networking that you might think.

Let’s talk about something we all understand first. If a young college student is doing child care studies, with the goal of becoming a child minder or nursery nurse, goes out and gets very drunk, falls over into someone else and a fight breaks out, a drunk and disorderly (or even GBH) charge may result. She will now fail the CRB check required to work with children. Mind you in extreme circumstance putting you bin out in the wrong day could also cause you to fail future CRB check!

Now apply this to social networking like Facebook, or ANY photo sharing service which allows tagging , naming and comments on photos, Flickr, Picasa Twitpic to name a few..

Now let’s re-visits the above scenario. A young college student is doing child care studies, with the goal of becoming a child minder or nursery nurse, goes out and gets very drunk, falls over, and is then sat in a pool of her own vomit with her underwear on show to everyone. Out pops all the camera phones, and with-in minutes that photo, she would rather forget, is posted ALL over the internet. Add some powerful internet search engine and you have a personal brand problem which is much harder to deal with than any official or corporate database will ever be.

Oh and just to make it worse, you have just been stitched up by your mates, not some organisation out to make money…..

You have been warned !!