FaceTheCitizen wrote:It does, actually. A picture can be seen by hundreds, thousands, and potentially millions of people. It's one thing when in front of a busload of strangers. Sure, they might tell their friends, but they weren't there, they don't know your face, and they'll probably forget about it after a short laugh. But with a picture, that shit can be seen by everyone and will stay up for eternity until the internet is somehow destroyed by Al Gore's evil twin.
And since those internet people are more likely to be very geographically distant from you, you're much less likely to ever meet one of them in person. By contrast, the people on the street live in your city and their social circles are likely centered there.
The bit about "they'll probably forget about it after a short laugh" also applies in the internet. How much detail do you remember about every funny GIF you've seen in your life, especially the less noteworthy ones like "lol look at this guy scratching his balls"? Sure, if you saw a picture of someone burning a cat or something else very noteworthy, you might remember that picture. Of course, the same applies IRL as well--an eyewitness' friends will remember that story a lot longer than the story about a guy cutting a huge fart on the subway.
And it's not just people mocking you online, either. Like the Scumbag Steve quote above, people can find out your info and harass you. You may not think that'd be a big deal, but after the 103rd call in the middle of the night where someone threatens to murder your family members, because, for the sake of argument, someone took a photo of you burning an effigy of the President of the USA, you'd be worn down too.
And if a crowd of people saw you burning that effigy in a public place, you could easily become a pariah that way too. Hell, you could potentially become a pariah even if those people just flat-out lied or mistook someone else for you. I mean, nobody took a photo of that librarian in Canada that Askias has been talking about--someone said on their blog that he harasses women and bam, instant pariah.
Keep in mind that describing something rather than taking a picture or video allows people to use their imaginations, which often just makes things worse. A couple imaginative retellings later, suddenly you were dancing naked next to that effigy shouting "Death to America!" as well, just because some git got the details of the story wrong.
Every time you add the internet to any equation, shit changes. This should be in future math problems from now on.
"If Mary takes a photo of herself in her lacey underwear and accidentally uploads it to Facebook, how many 'Hey sexii bitch, call me if u wanna a real man' comments will she receive in one minute? Show your work."
We're not talking about posting photos of things that are currently private, we're talking about posting photos of things that are already public knowledge. A better comparison might be Mary posting a picture of the dumb outfit she wore to school that day.