Publishing Power for All

Heed this warning: Beware all those that cannot read, write or publish if ye cannot publish ye shall perish to the whims and critiques of your peers.

The movie “The Incredibles” puts it best when a conversation between a son and mother poses this idea:
Helen Parr: Everyone is special, Dash.
Dash Parr: Which is another way of saying no one is.

If everyone can publish than does that make everyone publish worthy? This seems to be the debate that Denis Pelli and Charles Bigelow are engaged in. They surmise that with the influx of recent social media (facebook, blogs, Twitter) it seems that today, “at 0.1 percent authorship, many people are trading privacy for influence”. With this idea at play people believe they are giving a roadmap to find the collective “social conscience.”
Governments, businesses, and organizations must adapt to a population that wields increasing individual power. What now needs to happen is a governing of this kind of power. Who regulates what is correct to say on these social networks as they begin to infringe upon the civil rights of others life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I feel the story about the coach and his complaints about poor service works as a scenario of too much power. What about the other side of the story or a different perspective. From where was that employee coming from, could he just been caught at a bad moment? Was the coach overreacting or just venting? These become issues that are at play. From the standpoint of the employer, has he not taken too much stock in the information and publicity garnished from a tweet?
Not only can anyone post on the web, whatever they want, they are not liable or brought up on charges of slander. The individual’s power to publish comes from the fact that people are reading. More people are going to read the information written by one who is famous or more well known, however, if anyone reads anyone ones ideas are communicated to another and that learns to have legs and can spread. The internet allows personal opinion to spread fast, like a forest fire, especially when that news and information is “negative” to someone. Gossip ends up working like an accelerant added to a fire. No one knows where it is going to go. In this case of the pizza employee, the fire engulfed him/her.
Any publicity is better than no publicity has become a saying that has come after many stories that have appeared in the press. It is in these stories, where recognition is found, is beneficial rather than negative despite the context. Power to publish is in the hands of many and that power is used and misused daily, people’s behaviors are being modified and their attitudes are changing in this constantly changing world we live in. The new behavior modification technique t hat is becoming prevalent in our society, past operant conditioning, has become this idea that somebody is always watching and ready to flambé you. Social justice is reaching new heights now so call up McCarthy, call up Judge Hawthorne, because we are all becoming witches and Commies at the hands of all the tweeters and Facebook users.