Yesterday, Michele remarked that the Clarion Ledger was following her tweets, and that this creeped her out. I’m one of the other 364 people currently being followed by the Jackson paper — I’m also tailed by Mississippi Public Broadcasting, on twitter and flickr, and by nearly 20 people on twitter who don’t know me (dozens on flickr) and who I must assume were interested just because they see I’m in Jackson or that I am a teacher here. I responded to Michele to say that I’m not much bothered. Maybe it’s somewhat generational: I’m probably among the oldest people who don’t remember not having at least a family email address (growing up in a fairly tech-y family in a fairly tech-y region, I remember playing on Prodigy and The WELL before the Web was invented, and when I had fewer years than fingers). In any case, if I don’t specifically and explicitly elect for privacy, I don’t expect that I have any, and I’m not particularly concerned with what the lurkers are doing. I lurk too, sometimes.

This subject came up yesterday. This morning, in the middle of final exams, the fire alarm went off, I instructed my students to leave their tests on their desks, and we marched outside. From the field, at 9:36, I tweeted:

middle of the exam, fire alarm, fire trucks, chaos. Recess on the field. Kids fighting.

Some time later (after we returned to class and resumed testing — before my administration had communicated to faculty what had happened) I saw that Ben had tweeted a reference to the Clarion Ledger, which, at 10:05, had posted maybe 100 words, including a quotation from the fire investigator.

I don’t doubt that in the 30 or 35 minutes from fire alarm to Clarion Ledger posting, people at the newspaper received more word than just mine; but mine was available to them, and they were allegedly listening.

It occurs to me in light of this that school districts will inevitably attempt to forbid the use of cellphones by teachers, and other nervous or inept employers will do likewise, and it may ultimately be part of a first amendment decision.