We are all public figures now

Ella Dawson:

The woman on the plane is unaware that the woman sitting in the row behind her is watching and recording her every move. Rosey Blair, the stranger she helped sit beside her boyfriend, is projecting a story on top of her interactions that soon takes the internet by storm. Her detailed breakdown of their conversation and body language racks up hundreds of thousands of likes and retweets. Blair herself begins to accumulate thousands of new Twitter followers.

Not long after the plane touches down in Texas, the hordes of strangers following Blair’s tweets are eager to discover the identities of the personal trainers from Dallas. A hunt begins to find her Instagram account. Later the man, her seatmate Euan Holden, participates in the growing media circus because he also gains a ton of twitter followers, or because it helps his career, or because it’s fun, or because it’s just too late to go back to the anonymity of before.

Soon the woman begins receiving crass, sexually explicit messages in the comments of her personal Instagram profile. Her identity has been found.

Jim and I had an interesting discussion about this on Wednesday evening’s Your Mac Life show discussing the differences between public and private spaces and our expectations of privacy in each.