Internet full of downfalls and regret

BELLA COUNIHAN November 11, 2009
Comments 3
It has all the informality and appearance of privacy with all the trappings of creating a public record. Even those most aware of its pitfalls are easily able to fall into these traps - as Thomas Tudehope, a tech wiz kid and Turnbull adviser, and David Clarke staffer Charles Perrottet found out after allegedly helping to publish an Alex Hawke/Hitler Downfall spoof YouTube Video (although Tudehope maintains that he had no involvement in the video's production or dissemination). There is now a steady stream of stories like this, where an employee on a "sickie" has tweeted they've been at the pub, or where a media agency has picked up a hoax story. Most of the time, once you've posted a comment, it stays commented. Once you've emailed an email there's no way to bring it back. And the Internet voice of public individuals - or even those who work for them - is becoming more and more strongly controlled because of it.
The Tudehope/Perrottet affair is the perfect example of this.
The Hitler Downfall spoof video trend - where the crescendo scene of the Oscar winning film "Downfall" is re-subtitled with rants about other topics - was something that everyone with their hand in the online pot had at least thought about creating.
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On the surface, comparing Alex Hawke to Hitler does look pretty bad, particularly as Turnbull had given specific warnings about avoiding the public mention of the factional rivalries in the party.
The rivalry between Hawke and Upper house MP David Clarke (also a former boss of Hawke's) is particularly sensitive after an incident last month in which Hawke called police to a Young Libs meeting, claiming there were uninvited people pushing and shoving in his Castle Hill electorate office.
Opposing sources say there were no gate-crashers but people who had a legitimate right to be there.
Hawke had only called the police when he realised his supporters were out-numbered.
But it's important to put these things into context. There are literally hundreds of these spoof videos on topics comparing Hitler to lots of people. Perhaps it is in poor taste, but it is important to know the amount and variety of these videos that have been around since last year. There was one on the iSnack 2.0 debacle, another about when Ronaldo left Manchester United, one on an Obama speech and even one ranting about how there are too many Hitler Downfall videos. To be fair a lot of them are quite amusing as the full force of Hitler's rage is directed towards the trivial frustrations of parking issues in Tel Aviv or the Kanye West MTV awards incident.
As one Guardian journalist noted, it has become the medium of choice for armchair satirists.
The temptation to make an amusing portrait of Hawke, a man not too popular in Canberra or in Clarke's office, seems to have been too much for Tudehope and Perrottet.
And we've all done it, we've all sent an angry email we shouldn't have or tweeted something un-tweetable. A lot of the time you can retrieve these. On twitter you can delete tweets, gmail now even lets you take back those angry words and there is even a facebook application that can help you remove those undesirable pics of your wasted Saturday night tied to a lamp post in a tiara (or what have you).
But despite online services now recognising the regret factor - and enabling users to erase that which they no longer want to broadcast - it's still the case that once anyone else, your boss, members of your family or your ex, have seen the offending article, the damage is usually already done.
You need to be quick to delete.
These days, even if you take down your own site (for example if you've made a site about hot babes in the liberal party that doesn't reflect too kindly on the party's image) it can easily be cached. That is there will be a snapshot taken of the site at a particular point in time so that it can easily be found again.
Participating in this online world can be dangerous and even those who know that can still be trapped. The only way this kind of online quandary can be solved is to stop the public moralising about it. We need to collectively get over the fact that people say things and create stuff online they might not mean or was meant for a few eyes only.
Just like in real life.