Technology & Integrity

Last night at a dinner party the conversation came to technology and the way the world is today. It’s a whole new world. Things aren’t really private anymore… anything goes. Googling someone has become the norm. Gossip can travel at light speed.

One of the guests at the party is a high school teacher. She said teenagers are taking embarrassing photos and videos of fellow classmates with their cell phones and uploading them to the internet for the whole world to laugh at. Can you even imagine being in middle school and having to deal with that? Remember the good old days when someone took an embarrassing photo of you all you had to do was grab the film and break it or in the worst case rip up the picture and cut up the negative and it was gone forever… those days are gone forever.

There are at least 2 schools of thought on the new lack of privacy or public world that we now live in. There are the paranoid people worrying about who is watching them and then there are the people doing everything possible to get attention; creating websites, blogs, writing articles, sending out press releases, participating in forums, etc.

The paranoid people are worrying that the government is checking their emails. They worry that the grocery store is tracking what they buy. Worry that the Fastrac highway system is watching where they drive. In reality, the government very likely is reading some peoples emails, the grocery store is tracking what you buy and the Fastrac system probably does know everywhere you have been with your car in the last few years.

So what are you going to do? If you are paranoid you can always stop using email as a form of communication, pay only cash when you shop and ride your bike instead of drive.

I am not sure what I think of the world today. But what I do know for sure is that living a life of integrity is the only way to live these days. I wonder what this is going to do to the teenagers of today. Pre-internet days you could gossip and it was all based on what someone else said, there wasn’t actual proof. These days… phone messages are recorded and forwarded, Instant Messages are copy/pasted, emails are forwarded, 3-way calls happen with only 2 of the 3 on the call knowing. It’s more important now than it ever was to live in integrity, be real, always be yourself and don’t say something about someone that you wouldn’t say to their face unless you are prepared to deal with the immediate consequences.

Think about this… if you are going to say or write something about someone… make sure it is something you would say to their face. If it’s not, maybe you should be talking about something else.