Lifehacker's Virginia K. Smith on the trend of narrating others' quasi-public interactions for viral attention: "stop posting pictures of strangers."
It's invasive, inappropriate, and can even put the other person in danger. In a world that made any sense, this wouldn't require further explanation. This would be a commonly understood part of the social contract.
Instead, last week alone darkened the internet's door with stories about the insufferable #PlaneBae saga, as well as one of the more distressing Dear Prudie questions in recent memory (no small feat).
In the case of the former, Twitter user Rosey Blair spent hours live tweeting the flirtation of two strangers sitting in front of her on a flight, complete with pictures, garnering hundreds of thousands of retweets (she later made a thirsty attempt to parlay her viral fame into a job at Buzzfeed, which should tell you everything you need to know). In the latter, a Dear Prudie letter writer looked to be let off the hook after getting caught taking an unauthorized photo of an overweight colleague and "[sharing] it in an online community where we discuss the obese people in our lives."
Odd how the most trivially sociopathic people are so good at sensing where profit is to be made on the "empathy margins" where public and private life blur.
