Thoughts About the Immediacy of New Media

Watch your step (and your words).

My mother, ever the instigator of thoughts, emailed me Nir Rosen's response on Salon to the demise of his career for being thoughtless in his Twitter comments about the violent sexual assault on Lara Logan in Egypt. This is my response.

While I think the new social media makes it easier to be a thoughtless jerk, I don't think it changes people from being kind, considerate people to being thoughtless jerks.

With every revolution in communication there is a period when that medium's newness overrides people's need to think before they hit send or post. And, in the process of that new media becoming a mainstream communications medium, cautionary tales of missteps, stumbles, falls and outright career implosions will be the result.