A CORRECTION.

In the course of Monday's "Personnel Determine Performance," I suggested that Astronomer's Seventh Commandment transgressing head honcho and human resources (!?) director had co-workers along to give the impression of a company outing.  "Put your knife with a fork and a spoon and it looks innocent, doesn't it?"

Sorry, that was too good to be true.

At last week's Coldplay concert, for example, many social media users speculated that a third person seen near the two caught on camera was another Astronomer employee — leading to swarms of posts targeting her. But the company later confirmed that she was not at the event and said no other employees were in the video circulating online.

I apologize for running with a juicy story.  The mission creep that has accompanied the Personnel Office becoming the Human Resources Department can stand as a tragedy on its own, without any supporting casts.

Or might that tragedy be a consequence of developments in the broader culture?  That same article concludes with references to ancient concepts.

For the now-viral moment, “we can talk about what’s right and wrong, and whether they deserved it,” says Alison Taylor, a clinical associate professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Still, it’s a “very frightening thing to get a lot of abuse and harassment online,” Taylor notes. “There are real human beings behind this.”

It’s hard to think that that these kind of viral moments will ever go away — and there are few legal restrictions to stop users from sharing clips of interactions recorded from anything from a concert to the street widely online. But on an individual level, [Texas journalism professor Mary Angela] Bock says it can be helpful to “think before you share” and question whether something’s really accurate.

“Social media has changed so much,” Bock says. “But we really have not, as a society, caught up with the technology in terms of our ethics and our etiquette.”

I submit the causation runs the other way.  Deconstruct etiquette as probably oppressive, reap what you sow.  "It's the absence of bourgeois norms, including the shunning of loud and obnoxious people, that enables the status displays that draw the tag of 'toxic.'  Well, 'toxic' might not be the right word.  I like nyekulturny."

Put another way, I failed to heed my own advice.  "Celebrate a trashy, splintery culture long enough, all will be trash and splinters."  Social media, simply a bigger platform for spouting off in a colorful way.