It made headlines on national news and was the focus of considerable debate on "Hot Topics" for the View television program today. The story of former school teacher Nicole Howell's acquittal after being falsely accused of having sexual relationships with a sixteen year old student. Although, this was not the first time that the nation's attention has been riveted by a story like this, what was unique about this situation was the role of electronic media.
Apparently, the young man had been sending sexually explicit messages to his teacher and there had been an exchange of hundreds of text messages between them according to news reports. The student said that he had been seduced and given vodka. The text messages were deleted by the phone company and never seen, BUT...a teacher lost her job & reputation in large part due to her lack of discretion about the use of electronic media. Instructive...and extraordinary.
Many of us today fail to truly comprehend the extent to which electronic media and social media is set to change our lives. Recently, Google announced that it had reached an agreement with Twitter and would be indexing Twitter comments in Google Search results. Did you know this?
Twitter postings aka 'tweets' are now a part of permanent public record. They can be used as evidence and once something is online, the shelf life for practical purposes can be assumed to be...forever. This has implications for real estate agents and the brokers who manage them. It could be argued that what Ms. Howell did was likely mostly conducted outside of normal working hours. But, that didn't matter.
Today, many real estate professionals have accounts on various social media portals where they mix personal and professional postings together. As the topic was discussed on the View, one of the co-hosts noted that there should have been a public forum in which conversations between students and teachers could take place and be MONITORED. I can see the benefit in this for protecting students AND teachers.
I wonder if there would have been such a rush to pre-judge if Ms. Howell was not a professional? Is there a higher standard expected when there is a perception of expertise? In the future, is there a possibility that our comment stream, blogs and postings may be viewed in an entirely different light? What do you think?
Image courtesy of Sister72 on Flickr by Creative Commons license
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