Something Disintegrates at a Burger King

http://tweetagewasteland.com/2011/11/something-disintegrates-at-a-burger-king/

by davepell • 15 years ago

100 90 15 years ago

vannevar6• 15 years ago

In that Burger King, Andy Boyle thought he was listening to the disintegration of a couple’s marriage. He was really hearing the crumbling of his own ethics and self-restraint.

He might also have been hearing the crumbling of his own finances. His surveillance and subsequent reporting may be legally actionable and if I were that couple, I'd be lawyering up about now.

darklajid• 15 years ago

I didn't downvote you, but - how? And why?

Can a conversation that is forced upon other people (in a different setting I could imagine that guests in that BK complain about the couple shouting) still be considered private?

vannevar6• 15 years ago

Downvoters aside, it isn't at all out of the question. From http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/privacy/Privacy_R2d_Torts_Secti... :

"One who intentionally intrudes, physically or otherwise, upon the solitude or seclusion of another or his private affairs or concerns, is subject to liability to the other for invasion of his privacy, if the intrusion would be highly offensive to a reasonable person. " (emphasis added)

zecho4• 15 years ago

I don't think it's privacy that's the issue here, rather the degree of privacy. By live blogging the ordeal, it unwittingly went from an argument in a Burger King in front of a few people to an argument broadcast on the Internet to thousands. I don't think it's illegal and I probably wouldn't fault most people for doing this, but Boyle's a trained journalist. He should know the ethics of communication inside and out.

potatolicious7• 15 years ago

How in the world?

There are very clear laws and precedents that have hit the court room many times that make this situation very clearcut.

Boyle has done nothing illegal - recording anyone in a location where there is no reasonable expectation of privacy (a dining room at a Burger King definitely qualifies) is perfectly legal.

The use of this imagery is slightly more complex, but in this case there isn't really a case to be made. Non-commercial usage of someone's likeness in a broadcast is very well protected - and it can't be said that Boyle was using this couple's argument for commercial profit.

The only place where Boyle could run into trouble is recording on private (aka Burger King's) property. But even then, the laws around that are clear - unless there was clear signage prohibiting recording, or an employee of Burger King instructed him not to record, he's in the clear.

Morally? That's a minefield. But legally speaking I just don't see any case.

vannevar6• 15 years ago

Boyle has done nothing illegal - recording anyone in a location where there is no reasonable expectation of privacy (a dining room at a Burger King definitely qualifies) is perfectly legal.

I see a world of difference between a fight in a Burger King and a fight broadcast live over the Internet to thousands of people. The 'expectation of privacy' here doesn't seem as clear-cut as you make it out to be. I don't think you have to be in your own living room to have an expectation of privacy.

maaku6• 15 years ago

That is the way the law is currently structured and interpreted (in the U.S.A.), but it doesn't have to be that way. I have long been of the opinion that people should automatically own (representations of) their own expression, even in public. This is the opposite end of the spectrum from the current situation in the U.S., as you describe. Most jurisdictions in Europe are somewhere in-between.

That couple should have the right to sue. I understand that under the current framework they do not, but they should.

watty• 15 years ago

I'm sorry but what does twittering about a public argument and stealing nude pictures from Bourdain have in common? The whole thing is sensational - don't do stupid things in public.

"He was really hearing the crumbling of his own ethics and self-restraint." - Really?

johngalt• 15 years ago

It's not the classiest person who highlights/broadcasts the flaws in others.

JoeAltmaier• 15 years ago

It's called "Yellow Journalism" and its the lowest form of journalism there is. Sensationalizing something low and mean, for the purpose of aggrandizing yourself.

zecho4• 15 years ago

There's a thing in the Midwest known as minding your own business. There's also a whole cultural phenomena in large cities where people crammed together respect space by avoiding eye contact with one another. (Which, oddly, many Midwesterners tend to see as cold and aloof, but it's a built-in mechanism of cities).

Boyle traversed to needless gossip when he probably would have been better served to mind his own business, which is particularly annoying from him because he works with journalists as a "newsroom web developer" and presumably could be considered a journalist himself. He works at the Globe, and removed this fact from his twitter profile as people started questioning the ethics of the ordeal. I assume he was distancing his personal twitter from his professional life, but journalists don't normally get that kind of work/life balance from their employers.

I think the point of the Bourdain reference is that Bourdain's in the public eye as a celebrity, while this couple was not. One type of gossip is almost acceptable while the other type is decidedly not acceptable.

nknight5• 15 years ago

Having lived in various areas from the rural to the suburban to the urban (albeit not downtown SF or NY-style urban) on the west coast, I've never come across a culture in which fighting about your marriage in a restaurant was acceptable behavior.

And the more rural the area, the more likely it would have been for someone to walk up and tell them they needed to take their BS elsewhere.

philwelch• 15 years ago

So what happens in Midwestern cities?

TorKlingberg• 15 years ago

It seems like this is where the world is going. As soon as you leave your home you will be recorded, eventually by automatic cameras and microphones. Every place you go and everything you say or do will be recorded and spread to the world. Other services will analyze all the data and inform your family, friends, boss and business contacts when you do something of interest to them.

maaku6• 15 years ago

That will only happen if we allow it to happen.

extension3• 15 years ago

And it's really a boon for privacy, because we will finally be forced to a) actively care about it and b) define exactly what, where, and when it is.

It's not privacy that we are ultimately losing, it's obscurity.

aidenn0• 15 years ago

But obscurity has been good enough for privacy. Just look at the difference between a GPS tracker and assigning an FBI agent to follow someone.

In theory the information you gather is the same, but the ability to do it at scale allows you to collect data on people that you otherwise never would have, thus reducing privacy.

julian37• 15 years ago

That sounds quite optimistic. How do you "define exactly [...] where, and when" you can have privacy when you don't know where and when a camera or microphone might be aimed at you?

Anthony Bourdain's photo, referenced in the article, was presumably taken by a friend or family member only to be leaked a decade later.

And these days, using readily available tools such as telephoto lenses or unidirectional microphones, strangers can take part in your life from a distance of hundreds of feet. So, do you "define" privacy by making sure there never is a hill in line of sight?

When people start live-tweeting events recorded by their private satellite at some point in the future, do you make sure you can't see the sky so that the sky can't see you?

That's not the kind of privacy I'm looking forward to, and it's certainly not a boon.

EDIT: You are certainly correct that this will force us to define what privacy is -- or, more likely, to dismiss the concept altogether. Either way, it looks like we'll have to embrace this fundamental change, I can see little point in trying to fight against it.

vasco• 15 years ago

TL;DR People don't have common sense and make fools of themselves, then try to blame others.

maaku6• 15 years ago

Don't inject your own visceral response into an TL;DR.

funkah• 15 years ago

The live-tweeting thing was strange. It's funny that two fairly naive young people in a Burger King are deciding the fate of their marriage, in that it's so absurd. I do think there is humor there.

But something was off-putting about how faithfully the guy was trying to document this event. It seemed like he was really trying to put these two people's identity on blast, and foiled only by the circumstances (the quality of his phone's camera, the distance between himself and the couple) rather than, you know, any sense of propriety or mercy.

I guess what I'm saying is, the element of identity changes the stakes. Like I said, the notion of two people ending their marriage in a Burger King is so ridiculous that it's funny. But when it becomes John Smith of 123 Main Street, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, having a fight with his wife Jane, it starts to feel weirdly mercenary. Like it's not being done for a laugh anymore, but expressly to humiliate two people.

But, I agree that this is the way things are going whether we all like it or not. Whatever is in public is fair game for social media. But Mr. Boyle should consider exercising his powers of restraint a little better.

paganel• 15 years ago

There's nothing funny about deciding to end your marriage in a Burger King, in fact, I cannot think of any place where it would be "funny" to do that. This Tweeter-guy or whoever he is should have sticked to minding his own business, or maybe his life is so empty and lacking real-life relationships that he needs to live through other people's eyes and feelings. Now, that is funny.

CWuestefeld• 15 years ago

should have sticked to minding his own business

My guess is that the tweeting guy, and the rest of the patrons, would have preferred if none of this had happened. They didn't choose to be witness to the conflict. It was the choice of that couple to thrust the situation on the rest of the diners. In that context, I can't see that the twitter guy is guilty of anything other than, maybe, poor taste.

tripzilch2• 15 years ago

> But, I agree that this is the way things are going whether we all like it or not. Whatever is in public is fair game for social media. But Mr. Boyle should consider exercising his powers of restraint a little better.

Just because it's possible in a world with ubiquitous technology and social media doesn't make it right.

Whether a new technology causes society to suddenly lose part of their moral compass really depends on how many people passively "agree that this is the way things are going whether we all like it or not" and how many of us can actually still muster the effort to take some control and responsibility to steer towards what we believe is right, because ultimately society and "the way things are going" is made out of people, like you and me.

Also, I don't really believe this is a problem of new technology, it's just worsened by it. If this guy instead of tweeting, would have texted or called his friends to give a live report of some couple's marriage breakup, he'd be the same type of gossiping vulture. It's "just" that Twitter magnified the audience by some orders of magnitude, which makes him a really big and irresponsible gossiping vulture asshole.

rdtsc5• 15 years ago

> Just because it's possible in a world with ubiquitous technology and social media doesn't make it right.

Exactly. The logic here is pretty much exactly the logic applied by American law enforcement when using warrantless GPS tracking devices on people's cars. "Well you are in public anyway, we could just send a patrol car after you". Yes, taken to its logical conclusion it makes sense. However, I think most people would disagree. It doesn't feel right, and it is probably a matter of degree.

> If this guy instead of tweeting, would have texted or called his friends to give a live report of some couple's marriage breakup, he'd be the same type of gossiping vulture

What technology here has done is multiplied the power of a single individual. Some individuals, as we found out, are irresponsible and can be quite malicious. It so happens then that their malice is also multiplied.

Peaker2• 15 years ago

Why does this web site prevent my browser from zooming in the text?

Stratoscope• 15 years ago

I didn't check the site, but if it's the same problem that usually causes this, you can fix it with this userstyle:

http://userstyles.org/styles/54719/ctrl-plus-text-zoom-fix

Peaker2• 15 years ago

Thanks!

DanBC• 15 years ago

CSS uses -webkit-text-size-adjust: none;

It is very annoying.

sambeau• 15 years ago

Is there any good reason to use this css property? I can't rightly think of a single one.

v21• 15 years ago

"In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 people."

zecho4• 15 years ago

I don't think this is what was meant by the phrase. Fame and infamy are two very different things.

danso3• 15 years ago

I think the saddest thing is how this was on the ABCNews homepage. This was an amusing tweet-stream, but above-the-fold homepage material? It seems traditional media will jump on anything that involves traditional everyday activity (breaking up) combined with what they think is whizbang technology (Twitter, or, basically anything that is on the Internet)

wmf• 15 years ago

Fortunately, gimmicks tend to only be news once. No one will care about the second live-tweeted (ugh) marital fight.

tripzilch2• 15 years ago

What if I'd build tweepfights.com, a social/AI/mashup that keyword-scans Twitter for the most heated relationship arguments, automatically queries a couple of social networks to gather background information collected into a concise glossy report that people can of course retweet, Like, +1 and not to forget give their completely biased unwarranted opinion on.

It'd be like a crowd-sourced Jerry Springer show!

FuzzyDunlop• 15 years ago

Even in the most filthiest rag of a tabloid a story like this would get no more than a sentence long aside buried in the middle pages: "Man and wife argue fiercely in Burger King."

That this fella thought it a good idea to give a blow by blow account merely suggests he is too unscrupulous even for a red top. I don't find it offensive, just immensely disrespectful.

Either that or incredibly sheltered if the witnessing of a relationship on the rocks was so exciting to him.

nknight5• 15 years ago

If you're having a loud fight in public that's disturbing other people, I have no sympathy for you whatsoever. This is as bad if not worse than parents that won't take their screaming kid outside. These two idiots at least could have prevented themselves from screaming in the first place, but chose not to.

They have no expectation of privacy. They should have an expectation of global shaming, it's all they deserve.

pyre2• 15 years ago

You're constructing an artificial dichotomy of blame here. You're attempting to say that we can only blame the couple or only blame the broadcaster.

Does the general sentiment that 'no one likes a gossiper' only apply to private information?

Example:

   1. I'm with a friend in public
   2. I pick my nose
   3. No one notices but my friend
   4. My friend then shouts at the top of his
      lungs, "Hey everybody! This guy just picked
      his nose."

Are you going to pin a medal on my friend because you dislike people that pick their nose in public?

nknight5• 15 years ago

You're constructing a strawman. No one is trying to pin a medal on anybody here.

Some people are trying to publicly crucify Boyle (the irony is delicious, by the way) for exposing to ridicule those who deserve nothing else.

You don't need to construe his actions as particularly meritorious in order to not find him ethically deficient.

Ethics, by the way, are what the blog post linked to brought up. Ethics are also not the determinate factor in the conduct of a friendship, so you're doubly off in the woods.

thret• 15 years ago

I completely agree. These people were violating the personal space of everyone within earshot. I would have liked to see them get arrested for disturbing the peace.

LaGrange• 15 years ago

I guess they decided by doing a cold-blooded cost/benefit analysis of the entire situation. One plausible scenario would be trying to get a free consolation burger.

Confusion3• 15 years ago

  but chose not to

Have you ever actually gotten into a serious fight with someone in public? As tensions rise, you tend to become oblivious to the world around you. You don't need to be screaming to draw attention to a somewhat raised, agitated voice. Especially if everyone around you becomes silent. You can't expect rational behavior from two emotionally involved people being angry at each other.

  They have no expectation of privacy

Which doesn't mean we shouldn't grant it to them. If we would only ever give people what they were legally entitled to, the world would be an awful place.

nknight5• 15 years ago

> Have you ever actually gotten into a serious fight with someone in public?

Being capable of self-restraint (a trait the author laughably tries to attack Boyle with rather than the childish twits fighting in a restaurant), the answer is emphatically no.

> Which doesn't mean we shouldn't grant it to them. If we would only ever give people what they were legally entitled to, the world would be an awful place.

"Expectation of privacy" isn't just a legal term with specific bounds, it is an exploration of the bounds of privacy that society is prepared to accept. Idiots fighting in public have clearly surrendered their privacy, not just legally, but morally and ethically.

CodeMage• 15 years ago

I find your sense of entitlement appalling. You feel you have the right to decide who deserves what kind of treatment -- based on your own comfort, no less -- and use that to justify the meanness of other people.

I disagree with author on one point:

In that Burger King, Andy Boyle thought he was listening to the disintegration of a couple’s marriage. He was really hearing the crumbling of his own ethics and self-restraint.

No, he wasn't. As you have so kindly helped demonstrate, we live in an increasingly hedonistic society, where our ethics is defined by our surplus of entitlement and our lack of self-restraint.

nknight5• 15 years ago

Why, exactly, is it more "entitled" to expect fights to be taken out of public than for those fighting to expect the people they're disturbing to grant them the privacy they have obviously chosen not to care about?

rdtsc5• 15 years ago

> I have no sympathy for you whatsoever.

But would you start twitting everything to 'teach them a lesson'? How about puncturing tires on their car?

So it was inconsiderate for them to shout in public, OK, it doesn't make it right for others to be assholes to try to 'teach them a lesson' or to somehow pimp out the incident for publicity.

Also, if one was to apply some kind of absolute morality to this, shouldn't the disintegration of a marriage be a bigger issue to worry about than having to hear public arguments?

> These two idiots.

Are you sure they are idiots? Have you personally tested their level of intelligence.

Remember you are also in public, if public display of emotions, loud noises, yelling, kids bother you _that_ much, you should stay more and more inside, as you have no choice but to be constantly irritated.

steve8918• 15 years ago

We really have are turned into the world that George Orwell wrote about in 1984. If it's not the government recording us, it's our own fellow humans. It's kind of incredible and scary.

The part I remember most vividly about 1984 was the one scene where the main character had this one, tiny area in his apartment where he could stand where the cameras couldn't see him, and he treasured it.

To think that we're living in such a world now where our own privacy is exactly like this, something that is fleeting and to be treasured, is frightening.

njharman2• 15 years ago

Except there is a huge legally and socially understood difference between "your apartment" and "Burger King".

It would be totally different if dude had overheard this coming from open window of home and taken pictures through window. I would expect (no idea if so) that to be a criminal and/or civil invasion of privacy.

Privacy is not inherent/automatic. You have to take steps to establish privacy (move to private space being most common) before your privacy can be violated.

aroberge• 15 years ago

There's a huge difference between a one-time random tweeting event and constant monitoring. I'm not worried about random recording by strangers - but I am worried at the trend by many (most?) governments in their increasing capacity to record our conversations and control the means of communication.

reduxredacted• 15 years ago

The discussions on this post are awesome. So many are judging this is moral terms and from every perspective imaginable.

The two most prevalent are:

     "The fight was in public, the world has changed, I have no sympathy"
     "I would never live-tweet such a subject, that's an evil invasion of privacy"

We're given amazing tools to interact with others and culture has not advanced as quickly as technology has. Our interactions with other human beings are (and I apologise for the metaphor in advance), like services interacting with other services on a network. Sometimes one service breaks another by accident.

We're connected to everyone else in a different way today than we were 5 years ago (and 5 years ago I would have said 10 years ago). I could see myself over-sharing this sort of thing because it's unusual and because I have a twitter account and a device that sits in my hand and I don't know that my brain would have thought of much more than "this is unusual" (it helps that I have no twitter followers). I've also been in relationships where something like this could happen and wouldn't want someone to broadcast it.

I think the future is going to be a hard lesson in "give everyone the benefit of the doubt".

Confusion3• 15 years ago

Heidegger (and fellow philosophers) predicted this decades ago (and it has been taking place for decades). His "The Question Concerning Technology" (Die Frage nach der Technik) foresees how technology increasingly demands our attention and changes us through what it enables, when even mass television did not yet exist.

mikeash2• 15 years ago

50 or 100 years ago, the eavesdropper would have known the couple and would have told everybody in town about what happened. I don't really see any significant difference here. This looks like another example of people inadvertently pining for an imaginary past.

pyre2• 15 years ago

You're missing:

1. You can move away from a small town to escape the embarrassment.

2. The people of the town know you, and therefore have some sort of prior connection with you. Here we are getting the raw details of people who we've never met, thereby forming first opinions of these people before we ever meet them (should that ever happen).

mikeash2• 15 years ago

Just wait a bit, and the internet will find its new flavor of the week. Nobody who saw the tweets will recognize you three days later, or remember those first opinions.

You're right that it's not exactly the same scenario, but I'd argue that this new thing is still not as bad as before. Being embarrassed to people who know you is much worse than being embarrassed to people who don't.

estenh• 15 years ago

I watched this happen on Twitter. Hilarious distraction while I was doing some tedious work for class. Definitely didn't expect to see it on Gawker and ABC. Don't think the writer did either.

Now I'm just wondering when people will stop looking at this as some sort of societal commentary and realize it was just one guy having fun on Twitter while bored in a Burger King.

plink• 15 years ago

Lummoxine plunging headlong into their troughs and wrassling is of interest to whom exactly, and tarnishes whom?

njharman2• 15 years ago

> But usually those experiences are shared voluntarily

Arguing in public is voluntary sharing.

> with a decreasing respect for boundaries, has changed the equation. You no longer get to decide when to share.

The couple decided to share, in fact the people they subjected to their "sharing" are the ones who lost ability to decide. The public arguing couple was the one without respect for boundaries. Don't project your personal life onto others in a restaurant. It's fucking rude and selfish.

> a nude picture was stolen

Not even semi-related. Author's dishonest attempt at trying to compare/equate a violation of privacy with couples public outbursts is highly disingenuous. It is clearly not worth my time to read any more of author's spurious drivel.

strathmeyer• 15 years ago

What kind of morals is it if you think people shouldn't be talking about things? This isn't religion. You don't get to tell people what to think and do. Just because you're doing something bad doesn't make it wrong for others to think about it.

icebraining• 15 years ago

You don't get to tell people what to think and do.

Of course you do. In fact, you're doing it in that very sentence. It's called free speech.

You don't get to force them to actually abide by it, though.

analyst74• 15 years ago

I actually think this is a good trend. First, I have always had this minority/strange belief that the amount of privacy you enjoy is less relevant than how equal is the privacy you have compared to everyone else.

So if all your actions are recorded as soon as you go out of the house, it's annoying and invasive; but if everyone gets the same treatment, it suddenly is not a problem any more, because people will not be interested in you being mean to someone, or is looking sad, or whatever that it is you don't feel like sharing, because it's too common.

Heck, maybe even a lot of illegal things will become legalized or de-facto legalized, like light drugs, prostitution and the like. Systematic generalization like racism, ageism, sexism will be reduced, as people can know you personally quite quickly, instead of relying on our instinctive judgement. Basically, we will have a new understanding on things we previously consider bad/immoral, but somehow a lot of people do it. We as a society will either change our moral judgement, or catch and crucify those we still consider bad (like corruption).

Now, the tricky thing is, it's a slow process like any culture shift. We are all marching toward less privacy, but if you march too fast and got unlucky, you could end up on the news like that couple.

Something Disintegrates at a Burger King

Related Stories