Digital ethics

Is there a thought in your head right now? Racy, scandalous, obscene? Or just an observation about your delicious-looking lunch? Good. Write it down. Now show it to all of your friends and family. In fact, just yell it! Strangers need to know about your lunch!

I'm obviously talking about social media. When I'm tweeting about my own lunch, not that many people see it. But if the person tweeting is member of a large news corporation, like, say, ABC, and that tweet happens to be about the president, people might take notice. Like, a lot of people.

That's what happened in 2009, when President Obama casually mentioned that he thought Kanye West was an asshole after the VMA's. It was a statement overheard by many members of ABC, and while Terry Moran's tweet was the one that took off, several other employees also tweeted about it. ABC later apologized.

The details of this case don't really bother me - it seems to be a fluke that people even overheard the statement. But what does bother me is the immediacy of Twitter and other social media websites. In a newsroom, a story goes through several edits, even if it is being published on the web. Grammatical errors - and more serious libelous statements - are caught and corrected. When it's a reporter quickly typing out a 140-character tweet, those mistakes are often not caught until it's too late.

I'm not immune to the rush of breaking a story, either, even if it's just to my friends. A few months ago, I was waiting in the office of the counselor of the Journalism School at CU. I wanted to look over my classes for the next year, and make sure I was registering for the right things. Lots of kids had this same idea - I waited for a little over an hour, sitting on the couch and staring at the bright fish swimming around the tank. Soon, it was just me in the conference room. It was quiet, and I could hear everything the counselor was telling the student before me, a freshman.

"Well, they decided this morning that the journalism-plus program is going through, so I can give you the forms for that..."

My ears perked up. I hadn't heard that! I sent a quick tweet, saying something to the effect of "Just heard the journalism plus program is official. Anyone have details?"

I quickly heard from several professors I tweeted with, and students, all of them as surprised as I was. Apparently there'd been no official announcement yet. Almost as quickly, another woman stepped into the conference room.

"Someone just said they saw a tweet about journalism plus! How did they know that? It's not supposed to go out until tomorrow. __________ is upset."

The counselor looked upset. "I didn't tell anyone, I swear!"

I cringed - apparently I'd messed up. "That was me," I mumbled. "I'm sorry, I don't want to get anyone in trouble! I assumed it was fair game when I heard you telling that student. I thought I was the last to know."

They looked a little perturbed, but as I obviously hadn't meant any harm and offered to delete the tweet, they seemed to calm. They are staff in a journalism school, after all, and can't fault me too much for following my natural instincts.

But the point is this: I didn't think anything of sending a tweet, that had it gotten out, could have gotten any number of people in trouble - and for something that wasn't that necessary for the public to know. (In some cases, like an emergency, an error in a hastily-written tweet is justifiable.) Had I not had access to such an immediate form of communication, I might have thought for a few more minutes about what I was sending, or had a chance to ask the counselor for more information. I could have taken it back to an editor at a newsroom, and we could talk about it together.

But the fact that I literally had the ability to share my "scoop" with 300 people in seconds gave me more power than I really should be wielding.

I'm just glad it wasn't something more important - like the President calling somebody an asshole.

My first spam email

As a member of the internet population, I'm assuming everyone's gotten a few spam emails. I've gotten more than my fair share of "BEST EVER THING ON SALE NOW," "I need your help," and "aljslkdjflskfd" emails that are a little pesky but easily delete-able.

Today, I sent some.

Yeesh, I know.

But, in my defense, it was a really important spam email. I sent my family and some of my very best friends an email with a bunch of links about the Keystone XL pipeline protest that's going on in Washington D.C. right now. I've been following environmentalist Bill McKibben since his book, Eaarth, came out. I loved the book. You should read it (Now I'm spamming in my blog! Someone slap me!). But in any case, I've been watching this issue since he brought it to my attention.

Tar sands, also known as oil sands, are basically petroleum deposits. There are some huge, and previously untouched, tar sands in Alberta, Canada. It's only recently that we've even considered getting the petroleum out of these places because they're really clay, mud, and as the name suggests, sand, that have large amounts of petroleum that we've just now come up with the technology to profitably extract. Except that the process will also include burning a huge amount of greenhouse gases off into the atmosphere, up to four times the amount of greenhouse gases that producing conventional oil does.

The site in question is huge - enough oil to potentially last us for centuries. But it would be such a pain to get it all the way down here to us folks in America. So instead, there's a certificate of national interest sitting at the White House that would allow for the creation of something called the Keystone XL pipeline. It would take the oil down from Canada all the way to our refineries in Texas. Even without including the risk of a spill (the precursor pipeline and its' stations have leaked more than a dozen times in the last year) and the environmental damage that would cause, the pipeline is basically just a way to destruct our planet faster.

McKibben writes in a letter asking the public to protest, "The Keystone Pipeline would also be a fifteen hundred mile fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the continent, a way to make it easier and faster to trigger the final overheating of our planet, the one place to which we all are indigenous."

He also mentions climatologist Jim Hansen's finding that "the principal requirement is that coal emissions must be phased out by 2030 and unconventional fossil fuels, such as tar sands, must be left in the ground...If the tar sands are thrown into the mix it is essentially game over."

So, all that to say, I wanted my family to check it out. No, that's not right - I wanted my family to put together a fund to get me out to D.C. so I too, could be arrested. But knowing that wasn't exactly possible - or likely - I just wanted them to sign this petition that will be sent to President Obama. See, it's really his decision on this one, so the hope of the protesters is that the 275 arrests (as of today, but by the end of the two weeks, will likely be much, much, higher) and thousands of signatures on the petition sway his judgment a little.

Maybe the dozen friends and family I had deleted the email as soon as they figured out it was me becoming the crazy Boulder hippie they all knew I'd be.

But maybe a few of them looked at the video I sent, checked out the NY Times editorial that opposes the Keystone XL pipeline or just learned enough about the issue, so that if they hear it in the news in the next few weeks, they know what's going on.

Maybe that's what I'm doing to you.

Maybe you should sign the petition.