It is funny how Twitter created a psychology that what we shared was public, but somehow private too. I think it’s why people are often shocked when they get push back or pile ons. As though people feel they are making great proclamations but only into a hole in the ground.
And on the subject of regretting tweets, I recently went back and manually deleted a load and I was amazed at how small and nit-picky most of them were (even ignoring the early days when we literally just shared whatever mundane nothing we were doing in that moment). It was a dispiriting experience. Like reading the diary of a dull pedant.
Charles, I must object to the "stakes are so small" saying. People's careers are indeed very large stakes to them, and I have often thought this remark to be an extremely unjust dismissal by the speaker of the concerns of the target (essentially expressing "What is important to you is of no interest to me, thus it deserves to be derided since my opinion matters not yours").
Note there are many deeply contentious political topics where "work off the data" is a much too simplistic recommendation. Pseudo-scientific racism, just for example, has a whole industry of pseudo-"data". And there's issues of values which really aren't fundamentally data-based but we often pretend they are - e.g. should ordinary citizens have a right to own guns?
Anyway, I suspect Downes fully knew about the possibility of archiving, etc, and felt she was right in her actions. She was mistaken according to the judgment, but it's a different argument to claim that one should never fight because one might lose (or is fighting on the wrong side).
After all - somewhat insert tongue in cheek - that same logic might apply to making any post at all about a controversial social issue (or, for that matter, a comment on such a post ...).
It is funny how Twitter created a psychology that what we shared was public, but somehow private too. I think it’s why people are often shocked when they get push back or pile ons. As though people feel they are making great proclamations but only into a hole in the ground.
And on the subject of regretting tweets, I recently went back and manually deleted a load and I was amazed at how small and nit-picky most of them were (even ignoring the early days when we literally just shared whatever mundane nothing we were doing in that moment). It was a dispiriting experience. Like reading the diary of a dull pedant.
Charles, I must object to the "stakes are so small" saying. People's careers are indeed very large stakes to them, and I have often thought this remark to be an extremely unjust dismissal by the speaker of the concerns of the target (essentially expressing "What is important to you is of no interest to me, thus it deserves to be derided since my opinion matters not yours").
Note there are many deeply contentious political topics where "work off the data" is a much too simplistic recommendation. Pseudo-scientific racism, just for example, has a whole industry of pseudo-"data". And there's issues of values which really aren't fundamentally data-based but we often pretend they are - e.g. should ordinary citizens have a right to own guns?
Anyway, I suspect Downes fully knew about the possibility of archiving, etc, and felt she was right in her actions. She was mistaken according to the judgment, but it's a different argument to claim that one should never fight because one might lose (or is fighting on the wrong side).
After all - somewhat insert tongue in cheek - that same logic might apply to making any post at all about a controversial social issue (or, for that matter, a comment on such a post ...).