So NPR posted this article to their Facebook profile. From their "All Tech Considered" blog, the article in question is entitled "100 People I hate on Facebook".
Seems a bit harsh, but with Mark Zuckerberg named Time's Person of the Year, with all his efforts to get us to rethink things like privacy etc, it's worth exploring the idea viz. Lashon Hara, or gossip.
It's a topic I've brought up before, most recently this past high holidays, and one I spend a lot of time thinking about, especially because of the damage it can cause (cf. Wikileaks). But I also wonder: if teh interwebs are changing the way we communicate in general, as well as some other fundamental ideas (have a conversation about paying for online content with some web natives, like teenagers, and you'll see what I mean), what are the broader implications in terms of lashon hara? We've seen cyberbullying; but are there other elements as well? Could there be productive elements to eliminating lashon hara? What do I mean? There's a Chasidic saying that the telephone teaches us Torah, in that 'what is said here is heard there'. If we took that attitude with our online personae, would that begin to change our day-to-day encounters as well?
So: what do you think?
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