by TotallyUncool » Tue Oct 13, 2020 1:43 pm
I haven't been paying too much attention to the details of what she was saying, or how people reacted - mostly just enough to get a general picture. But it really does seem like a case of someone venting about life, work, and co-workers, and the whole thing turning into a problem largely because it became public.
But it got me thinking about that quote from Gabriel Garcia Marquez - "Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life and a secret life."
Which is, I think, a hugely important point, although I'd take it even further by saying that there are degrees of public, private, and secret - and with just about any action you take, you have to be at least somewhat aware of not only where that action is on the public-private-secret scale, but where you want it to be.
One of the problems of online life is that it often isn't easy to tell where you are on that scale - the safest approach is to probably assume that whatever you're doing is at least a few degrees closer to the public end than you think it is. Most of us have a fairly large margin of error, simply because we're low-visibility (not even pseudo-celebrities). But if you're high-visibility, even a small difference in where your actions fall on that scale can turn out to be very important.
In a lot of ways, it sounds like that's what happened with Risa - she treated whatever social media/messaging system she was using (SNS? Insta? Whatever.) as if it was somewhere over on the secret end of the range, when in practice, it was more like on the border between public and private.
I don't know whether entertainment-industry agencies actually try to educate the performers they represent about understanding and maintaining appropriate levels of privacy or secrecy, or whether they just tell them which social media they can or can't use, and leave it at that - probably the latter. But it sure sounds like everyone involved would be much better off if Risa had received some serious instruction in the what, why, and how of keeping things genuinely secret (as opposed to just "don't do it").
If madness made us strong, we would all be invincible.