The sacking of columnist Catherine Deveny by The Age shows what a difficult place the internet is and how fraught it is to for any organisation to manage the behaviour of its employees, either full time or as freelancers.
Just like in the real world there are people doing all sorts of things, some in good taste and others not. In the old physical world few people would spot you if you urinated behind a tree during the Anzac march, swore at a granny, or drew a biro moustache on an image of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
It’s unlikely that you’ll be sacked for being ridiculously drunk at a dinner party or snorting coke from the agency chairman’s bottom at the AdNews Agency of the Year Awards, mainly because few people will see it.
But on the internet everything is laid bare. Everybody can hear you scream and swear.
I recently outlined some of these problems for the new Knowledge@Australian School of Business site, talking to companies that have defined what is good and bad practice.
The difficult and grey area is when it comes to employees and how they behave in their own personal time. Luckily I still haven’t been sacked (yet) for that drunken night at the Dogs Bar or the direct messages that somehow went public very late one night about exactly what I‘d like done with the dark chocolate.
In reality, a company can’t rule somebody’s personal life and we all behave badly in our spare time to different degrees.
The problem is with a high profile media personality is defining where the boundaries lie. And perhaps old media types need a better understanding of the dynamics and the ephemeral nature of the Twitter stream with Tweets that would vaporise if it wasn’t for the likes of tabloid journalists, Today Tonight and A Current Affair trawling for stories.
Deveny’s trade is edgy comedy, the sort of stuff that often offends. I’ll admit to pissing myself over some of those tweets. And then I moved on.
If there is a lesson it is that we are all human and that this story probably has more to do with wingnuts agitating the situation, without which it would have all been washed away in the Twitter stream. And also the growing conservatism of the media in Australia.