Couple of interesting passages here. One on shame, from Megan McArdle…
Like many people who have been writing on the Internet for a long time, I find that the minute you make human contact with someone, they often get rather sheepish and apologetic about the terrible things they’ve said. A polite note written back to an intemperate diatribe, or an in-person encounter, often elicits sheepish apologies that all run along the same lines: They weren’t really thinking of you as a person much like them, whose back aches in the evening and who worries about the price of breakfast cereal, but as a sort of cartoon figure of great and malevolent influence.
…and one on social media, from Terry Teachout (H/T: @MZHemingway)
By the time I started writing regularly for the national media, I’d long since learned that there are things you simply don’t say in public, many of which would be innocuous in a better-regulated world but are nonetheless far more controversial than they really ought to be. In addition, I started blogging in 2003, three years before Twitter came along and sufficiently ahead of the curve to permit me to fully internalize the inescapable but easily forgotten fact that you own everything you post on the social media, now and forevermore.
Continue reading Some thoughts on shame and social media in the political sphere.