Where do the ethical obligations of journalism kick in? If you are a blogger, does that make you a journalist? Do you have an obligation to double-check your sources to verify the accuracy of everything you post?

Julie Strietelmeier, a self-professed “tech geek writer” got an email from a reader, telling a story that started when a friend wore his Google Glass into a movie theater (they were prescription lenses) and detailed his detainment by homeland security. Follow the headline link and read the story. It’s worth it.

The details of the story aside (it really is a chilling read), there are two things that really jumped out me.

As this post already asked, what obligations did the writer have before posting the story online? Lots of bloggers ran with it before Julie felt pressed to verify the details. In a sense, she was coerced into behaving like a journalist. I’m in a similar boat. I don’t have the resources to ferret out news stories. I read a lot, and post stories I find compelling, thought provoking, or just fun. When I can, I do some basic fact checking to make sure what I post passes my own internal truth detector, but I am more of a scientist than a journalist. My own sense of journalistic integrity comes from wanting to do a good job, wanting to get it right, not from any sort of official journalism-school training.

The second thing that stood out was the fact of wearing Google Glass into a movie theater. Some people might say, this is an obvious no-no. Google Glass can record video, and wearing it into a theater is asking for trouble. True. But get used to it. In some small number of years, the ability to record will be so incorporated into our clothing and our bodies, movie theaters will either have to close, or the movie industry will have to accept a certain level of piracy as a given.