Dexter Iowa Community Site

Consider this quote from Abe Lincoln

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

     Social media seems to be something most all of us are tied into one way or another. From my children to my grandmother to distant cousins we are all tied in electronically via Facebook or through the use of emails. It is easy to remember back to the days of the calendar with large boxes big enough to write all the important information in, hanging beside the old black rotary dial phone in the house I grew up in. It is even harder to think that for a few years it was even a party line.

     Today we have connected our lives electronically through the use of computers, notebooks and smart phones. I hate to admit that I generally throw away phone books when they show up in my mailbox these days, relying on my contact list on my phone and Google to look up an important number. It is there when I need it, instantly and with little effort needed on my part.

     But as helpful as these gadgets have become in our lives we have taken for granted their ease of use and forgotten to be careful around them. I don’t give much thought to the fact that when I type out an email and hit send that it will find my intended recipient. Usually a reply comes fast, although sometimes they can be short little bursts of information that really leave me wishing for the days when we actually wrote a letter and put it in the mail. The other issue that rarely comes to mind is that although we may hit the delete button on emails they actually leave an electronic signature that can be stored by our provider for years.

     The recent news of former Des Moines school district superintendents email use has brought to mind that each of us who use an email account need to take caution with what we write and say, depending on who owns that email service. I learned long ago when I worked at a company in Des Moines that there is a mentality in the business world that you, as an employee, are out to hand out company secrets or cheat your employer out of time. Many businesses have a paid employee whose job it was to read each and every email that is sent across the server. Call it what you will, but regardless of how you view it as an invasion of privacy, you don’t really understand it, until those emails show up in the hands of your boss or the information contained within them is shared with people you would rather not know your personal business.

     Regardless of how we feel about the content of what was contained in the emails that caused her to resign, I am concerned that the judges ruling gives too much control to the business entity in ownership of a persons thoughts. Did she show poor judgment in the use of her email, which she had to of known was being read by some nerd in a small windowless room? Absolutely. But what public good can be served by the printing of those emails in the Des Moines Register or any media source? Does printing them expose some major scandal involving taxpayer funds? Do they help to make the public aware of a situation that could have long lasting effects on the school district or the way it is managed? In this case I feel that neither of these is being served, and they would only be printed in order to sell newspapers. If she had been emailing someone outside of the district about students, or the black market trade of government cheese meant for the hot lunch program exposing them would make perfect sense. But we are talking about an affair, which in the end is neither the business of the district or the community as a whole.

     Call me a bit unrealistic if you would like, but it would seem to me that company, or district as it is in this case, time could be better spent improving the product being placed before the consumer, rather than playing watchdog, babysitter and judge all wrapped up in the guise of “protecting company assets.”

     I have worked in places like this, have had a few emails come back and bite me in the rear end, although nothing of the nature that the superintendent’s emails contained. I’ve been written up at jobs for sending quote unquote, personal emails on company time (including emailing my column to the editor) and have even worked in places where our phone calls…. every phone call was secretly recorded and played back to us in order that we “improve our customer service skills on the phone”.

     If you are a business owner out there who is reading this and allocates money and resources to do either of these shame on you. Not only does it breed an air of dissention amongst your employees, it also instills in them the notion that you don’t trust them to do their work, get the job done and succeed at it regardless if anyone is watching or not. I’m not saying that you don’t have the right to protect your business, but there comes a point where you have to trust the people you hire to make the right decisions and to flourish under your watch from a distance.

     The rest of us need to be continually aware that “big brother” is watching you, just waiting for the opportunity to find you doing something “wrong”. You have to police yourself and be careful about what information you are putting into emails. I remember back when I was younger someone once told me never to put anything to paper that you wouldn’t want displayed in public. The same is true for emails today, and social media sites like Facebook. When you place it out there it is no longer “your property” and is subject to use by anyone who happens across it. Should we all be a little paranoid about it? Perhaps, especially if you have to interview for a job and the employer goes back and digs through your social media accounts for the last five years. In reality we have these wonderful tools to use, and just need to take care to make sure we are using them wisely and be cautious about what we place on them….for you never know who might be looking over your shoulder electronically.

See you next week….remember, we’re all in this together.