Live Tweeting Other People’s Business

The Times We Live In: As we are all well aware by now, the days of privacy and discretion are over for many. We are all used to people broadcasting their lives in intimate detail across all digital platforms at all times, and we are also growing accustomed to daily news about sexting politicians and hacked celeb nudie pics. Here’s yet another example of private information gone public: Andy Boyle, a newsroom Web developer for the Boston Globe and boston.com, took it upon himself to live-tweet a fight he witnessed at a Burger King between a young married couple; or as he put it in his first tweet documenting the incident, “I am listening to a marriage disintegrate at a table next to me in this restaurant. Aaron Sorkin couldn’t write this any better.” Boyle goes on to give blow-by-blow Twitter coverage of the argument and even posted a picture of the couple. While, yes, it does make a for an entertaining read, it is a totally voyeuristic, tasteless move on Boyle’s part. It’s one thing to jot down interesting/funny/embarrassing human interactions that you overhear for your own amusement or for material for something creative like a short story or movie scene or whatever; but to publicly post over 20 tweets and pictures for all of your followers and the rest of the Web to see is crossing a line — it’s exploitative. Particularly, something so personal and painful as a marriage imploding. Unfortunatley, it seems that everyone wants attention, whether it’s more Twitter followers or Web buzz, even if it’s at the expense of others’ privacy. The Daily What

Facebook Finally Takes Down Rape Pages: Yes, people do a lot of really dumb and offensive things on Facebook like setting up pro-rape pages. Facebook has finally, after two months of people petitioning, removed the disgusting and hateful pages, which violate Facebook’s terms of use. It is a shame that when content is actually obscene, violent, and hateful, as these pro-rape pages clearly are, that it takes Facebook so long to do the right thing, but when it comes to innocent images (like the Courbet painting or women breastfeeding) Facebook is quick to censor. Gawker