“The Eyes of the World”

Every morning one of the first things I do is check my e-mail messages. I go through each one of them and see which ones require an answer. I mark those “unread” so they will not be deleted. When I have finished going through them all, I go back and start answering them. Some are professional and some are private, but each one gets answered and forevermore is apart of my computer.

Now you can delete these “letters” until the cows come home but I don’t believe they are ever gone until you pull out the hard drive and pulverize it. Even then some techno-geek could probably put it together again and read off what you had sent. Does that sound ominous and dangerous, well it should. Do not write something on your computer you do not want the world to end up seeing.

How many times have you seen those poor dopey men being caught up in a scandal and the evidence against them being e-mails or texts? Now you can also add “tweets” and “Facebook entries” It can be a message to his mistress or a comment about his work environment that gets him into hot water. And each time I see it I wonder how stupid someone can be.

There are also the innocent comments we send in e-mails that get us into trouble. I consider myself to be witty, possessed of a dry kind of charm. Well that doesn’t come across good in e-mails. Sometimes I come across as snarly and rude, which I never mean to be. You can add as many :) as you can and it still will be interpreted wrongly by someone.

There is always the danger of giving TMI (too much information) on your Facebook page or Twitter site or even your website. I used to post when I was going to be appearing at a book festival or something else like that. My wife finally asked me not to do that anymore as people could check out our schedules and know when we were going to be away from home.

It made sense to me that I shouldn’t do that as I have heard in the past about people who had a death in the family. While the grieving family is at the church or the graveside people would enter their homes and steal from them. The same thing could happen to people who put TMI on their computer sites.

When I was growing up this was not a concern. We didn’t have computers in the Stone Age. We just chiseled our messages in a stone and rolled it over to the next cave. If we didn’t want anyone else to read the message we just busted the stone up into little pieces. End of problem.

Today is an entirely different place. We have people who search for incriminating information on the computers. We make errors with our e-mails and send them to people we didn’t mean to get them, and usually that has a bad result. We use our office computers for personal messages and then get upset when the company reads what we have written. It is all a vicious cycle that puts the computer in control of our lives.

Just remember that when you e-mail, tweet, text or do anything else involving a computer the eyes of the world are on you. And it all may come back to bite you in the rear. A little discretion is a wonderful thing.
 

 

 

 

 

©2009 Jackie K. Cooper

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