Thought for the Day
Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
Thursday, November 25th, 2010

A bishop down in England got himself in trouble this week after revealing his feelings about the upcoming Royal Wedding in a forthright manner on his Facebook page. The tabloids got hold of part of the online exchange and the rest was, shall we say, history.

A long line of folk have fallen afoul of the new technology. The standard defence of “I have a right to an opinion” or “it wasn’t intended for wider dissemination” won’t wash - not for the boy from Accounts making a cheeky comment about the young lady at the next desk which gets loose on the office email - not for a Bishop making comments online.

The adage from Luke’s Gospel: “What you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed upon the housetops” was always the rule even in the days before the Flood when people used pens and paper, typewriters or simply talked in low voices around the water cooler. In some ways nothing has changed. It’s just that the “send” button is so tantalizingly close to the text box we send things off immediately.

The word “immediate” here means two things. It means something which happens quickly but also that it happens “without mediation”. We return to the thing we've written a month later – even five minutes later – and might well say “I didn’t mean exactly that” or “I could have said that differently”. The inner gatekeeper springs to life too late.

We need to weigh what we say in moments of anger or in a flurry of dazzling wit. There are flesh and blood human beings at the other end of our words. There are flesh and blood human beings who are the subject of our words. The humanity of those people doesn’t always figure in the equation at the spur of the moment nor does their capacity to be hurt by what we’ve said.

On reflection, this should give us greater cause for regret than any trouble we might have incurred at work.