Open All Night

As I mentioned in yesterday’s entry, I have been reading the Sunday paper. Another article from it spoke of the technology effect on professional athletes. It talked about Michael Phelps, amongst others, and how a cell phone camera can lead to mountains of headaches. Essentially it stated that athletes have to perpetually have their guard up. It also talked about how athletes can use it to their advantage, such as how Shaq has been using Twitter. But, the main premise was that within 10 minutes the PR work done over a career can erode nearly instantaneously. So how does this affect the average Joe?

I could expound on this topic for days. Heck, we just saw yesterday how an Eagles game day employee was fired because he made a disparaging remark about the team on his Facebook page. The world is getting smaller and smaller.

I watched 48 Hours over the weekend, and they had a murder mystery story. Succinctly, a couple started dating and having a long distance relationship. They broke up but continued to see one another for carnal reasons. Then one day he was found dead with vicious injuries, including a gunshot wound to the face, a slashing, and something like 27 stab wounds. A digital camera was found in the washing machine. Despite the pictures being erased, and it run through the machine, police were able to recover the camera. There were pictures of the two of them “indisposed”, followed by two out of focus pictures that matched his pattern of injuries, with a timestamp just minutes after the other pictures. This was finally enough to charge her with the crime. But it took five weeks to do so.

Anyway, this story really stuck with me for some reason. So, I used the good side of the internet, and tried to find more information, perhaps something that was left out of the TV story. I started at Wikipedia. I was shocked to see there was not a page devoted to it. Generally if it involves a serious crime, or pop culture, it is there. You want someone reasonably important? Good luck. You want the 19th person to make it to Hollywood on Idol? It’s there. I didn’t have any more time to look for it, so I forgot about it. Since I usually like to surf the internet when I am playing poker, I had the chance last night. I decided to simply google her name. And the first result? It was her Myspace page.

I clicked on it, and was somewhat bewildered by what I found. Sure enough, her last login was five weeks after the date he was killed. I went through her blog with inspirational quotes, and got to her wall with postings from her friends. I scrolled down, and scrolled down, and sure enough, there was a post from him, with a not so veiled comment about her level of attractiveness. I went from there to his profile, and did the same thing. His wall had many more entries from her, but there they were, all just preserved like an electronic fossil.

I have to admit that I was pretty shaken. After all, I now knew a lot about their story, from everything I heard. But here were some of their personal interactions. Sure, they were not private ones, but still. It is just another affirmation that the electronic age creates another dimension to think about relative to the legacy that we leave from our short time on this earth.

Pensively yours,
-Michael