An Ethics Alarms Quiz for a hot sleepy Sunday:
Grant’s Tomb or the National Stupid Question Monument
Young Georgia Ford of Great Britain wasn’t a veteran of Twitter, and when she sent a tweet to her followers naively asking if the Wimbledon tennis tournament was “always held in London,” she had no reason to expect that viral re-tweeting would make her an international laughingstock. It did though, as thousands of Twitterphiles, and some celebrities, pounced on her question and mocked her by name. “Wow, that Georgia Ford tweet from earlier is possibly the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” tweeted one Laurence T. Green, who obviously does not follow the speeches of Joe Biden, the political opinions of Bill Maher, or the periodic pronouncements of Rep. Allen West. Embarrassed and humiliated, with her name being made a synonym for ignorance, Georgia closed her Twitter account.
Your Ethics Quiz: Was Georgia’s treatment by the Twittersphere unethical, or was her tweet fair game for ridicule?
I can see the argument for mockery. Twitter is a public forum, and participants shouldn’t get involved unless they understand the risks and the rules of the road. Any tweet risks public exposure. Not only that, but the internet is not for the faint of heart or thin-skinned.
Everyone knows, or should know, that one silly “Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?” type question doesn’t make you a fool. Georgia had a good response to her tormenters, which was to laugh along with them, like my sister did long ago when she responded to a friend’s invitation to go out trick-or-treating with the response, “Sure! What night?,” and my mother did when the fact that the Washington Monument changes marble color about half-way up prompted her to ask, in all seriousness, which half was built first.
Nevertheless, my view is that the treatment of Georgia was unethical, and amounted to cyber-bullying on a grand scale. The tweet could have been quoted and passed on for its amusement value without publicizing Georgia’s name around the globe. What did she do so momentous and vile that earned the punishment of being an international punchline? All those tweeters got twisted enjoyment from piling on with a cyber-mob in the ridicule of a total stranger for being naive and uncool. If that isn’t bullying, I don’t know what is. Georgia may have carelessly blundered into a cyberworld that was meaner than she expected, but in such situations everyone else should have been heeding the Golden Rule. This is exactly the kind of situation it was designed for.
The Twittersphere owes Georgia Ford an apology.
_____________________________________________
Pointer: Roberto Kusabbi
Facts: Huffington Post
Graphic: Grant’s Tomb
Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at jamproethics@verizon.net.
Ethics Alarms 
And to answer your question: No one is buried in Grant’s Tomb, because Grant’s Tomb is a mausoleum and is completely above-ground. That technicality aside, Former President Ulysses S. Grant and his wife are interred in Grant’s Tomb.
Now you know.
–Dwayne
I did know—it’s a trick question, but still the most famous “stupid” question, fair or not.
What color was Washington’s white horse?
Although this was overboard, I understand the temptation to mock Georgia Ford. It is not an urge to mock her for her ignorance, but to mock her for her laziness and her apparent sense of entitlement. People today have the library at their fingertips. From their computers to their smartphones, they have access to the cumulative knowledge of the internet, yet they don’t use it. A quick check of Wikipedia would have answered her question. There was no need to ask dozens or hundreds of people this question. This same attitude has led to the website “Let Me Google That For You”. Asking this question on Twitter was like walking past several trashcans to ask someone if they could throw this dirty Kleenex away for them.
Yes because twitter is for serious people who have important things to do and they obviously can’t afford to have their time wasted over trivial questions. What if somebody had written an important tweet about their lunch, perhaps some people would have missed it because they were too busy answering a dumb tennis question.
You go, A. Brown! I totally agree.
Michael, just because she chose to use a different resource than you would have, doesn’t make her lazy or entitled. If I had a hockey stats question, I would ask my son. It is faster than looking it up, I know he knows the answer and I am 100% certain his answer would be correct. I have so many problems with this one, starting with your comment and others like it.
The fact it was tweeted as a question tells us that she doesn’t know the answer and she knows she doesn’t know. If people are pounded for asking dumb questions, how are they going to learn? What ever happened to ‘there is no such thing as a dumb question’ or ‘better to ask and learn than guess in ignorance’? What exactly are we asking Ms. Ford to do? Never ask a question again because she isn’t smart enough to formulate a question?
Mocking young people for their ignorance sounds like real stand-up intelligence to me. You must be so proud.
If she just opened her twitter account, I doubt she had hundreds or even dozens of followers. She was asking her friends, very likely without knowing this could result. And “Asking this question on Twitter was like walking past several trashcans to ask someone if they could throw this dirty Kleenex away for them.” rates right up there on the stupidity scale as her question. I can’t even believe that statement. Are you on Twitter? Her question, I am certain, was not even the stupidest thing to appear in the global feed that day. I bet it wouldn’t even have ranked in the top 10. Twitter is full of stupidity.
All my above indignance does not even start to address the ridiculousness of Huffington Post and Daily Mail posting this as a news item. HP even put her name in the article title. Wonderful. Now some prospective employer can google her years from now and find out just how stupid the world thinks she is at 21. Not to mention that they were both so rushed to put it up that they copied/pasted the same tweets! If it went viral, they should have had way more than those few to chose from but we got the same images as examples on both sites. Such a hot news item, they didn’t have time to research I guess. And they are actually pretending to report, she was just a 21 year old girl asking her friends a question, not pretending anything. But she must be so much more lazy and entitled then they are why?
Good grief! If you have had time in your life to read and research every single question you have ever wanted an answer to in your lifetime, you either have way too much time on your hands, no natural curiosity or no friends to talk to. Or, more likely I think, you are just living in a glass house. Watch out for the stones.
Now who is the bully, Danielle? You didn’t even bother to read my post. I clearly stated I would not mock her for her ignorance, but for her laziness. I also clearly stated that what happened to her was overboard. I merely stated that I understand the temptation to mock her. You seem to have plenty of time to mock me, but not enough time to actually read my (much shorter) post.
As for lazinesss, It takes less time to google “Wimbeldon” than to post the tweet. This was not a complicated question and the answer was clearly out there already answered. In addition, Twitter is not an very good way to get the right answer to your question. It is probably on par with Yahoo! Answers as a way to get the wrong answer.
There ARE dumb questions, they are the ones that were just answered. People have the answers at their fingertips, but they refuse to use them. They also refuse to learn how to use it. I am not alone in being frustrated by this type of behavior.
http://letmegooglethat.com/?q=Wimbeldon
Michael, you are absolutely right about the mocking ignorance point. My fault. I did read your post. It pissed me off and I typed quick. I even took note of that when I read it and it took me less than 2 seconds to forget. I apologize. Entirely my bad.
Since I was responding directly to you, with similar tone, and giving you an opportunity to respond, I don’t think my comment could be called bullying though. What Jack experiences every time he enters the realm of pot legalization is bullying. There is a difference between bullying and argueing. This is it.
I can’t agree with your comparison to GF’s question to “people having answers at their fingertips and refusing to use them” though. Talking has always been a way to get answers. Most people do it. In fact, everyone I know does it. I am as frustrated as you only what frustrates me is people having no patience for others behavior when it is exactly the same as their own. Unless you are saying that you have never asked a question. Or possibly you have never asked a question where the answer seemed obviously once you knew it. Or that you only ask good questions. Either way, the point of a question is to gain knowledge. Something we should be happy she is doing since it seems to be a dwindling desire.
Thanks tons for the link, I didn’t bother before because I don’t care about Wimbledon at all. I’m more likely to ask my son that hockey question I am equally uninterested in. When I followed your link, however, I discovered that if we want to trust Wikipedia (the truth is out there, you may not be reading it here), thier position is as follows:
“Wimbledon had its own borough of Wimbledon and was within the county of Surrey; it was absorbed into the London Borough of Merton as part of the creation of Greater London in 1965.”
Since the tennis tournament started long before 1965, according to the Huffington Post, this would mean that rather than GF being the stupid one with a stupid question, all those tweeps that thought they knew the right answer were the dumb ones. She did after all ask if it had always been held in London, not if it had always been held in Wimbeldon. Technical historian types are probably ‘having a laugh’ today at their expense. Probably not so publicly.
I still don’t get how you ‘understand the temptation’ to attack her for the question. You attack opinions, not questions. If someone I knew asked me a question, my response would never be “go look it up”. It might be, I don’t know, why don’t we look it up. We should be encouraging questions and I think GF is probably reluctant to ask them today. I disagree with you that that is understandable in any way.
For what it’s worth, for a few years when I was very young and tennis-illiterate (up to when “Chrissie” Evert came along), I thought Wimbledon was in Australia (maybe because of Evonne Goolagong, if you know who I mean). But finally, my family’s National Geographic subscription got the best of me; it dawned on me with a question I asked and answered unilaterally: “Why would the big tennis championship be played IN THE WINTER?”
I teach college, and this ignorance and laziness are two of the largest impediments to my job. It is difficult to teach anything without expecting the students to know something about something. I try to relate my lessons to everyday objects, but I am running out of everyday objects. If I ask students to find out how a AA battery works, what its voltage is and why, and how a 9 V battery differs, roughly 25% will do any of the assignment. They will say they don’t know what the voltage of a AA battery is and don’t know how to find out. They will show up at my office and ask me to search for the information on their computer for them because they “aren’t computer people”. If I ask them why the copper composition of pennies changed in 1982, I get people showing up to ask me the answer or people who answer that “we needed the copper because it was during WWII” (don’t laugh, that actually happened). My students need to be able to do some learning on their own. I can’t do my job if all 75 students walk past the dictionary to ask me what “combustion” is. They need to be a little self-motivated and a little self-reliant. I don’t need them to be MacGyver-like, I just need them to be able to use Google, the dictionary, and an index (and I cover the use of these three things the first week of class because they truly don’t know).
The culture of ignorance has me ready to pull my hair out and scream. I hate the teachers that cause it and the society that enables it. Here is a short list of some things NONE my college students knew this year.
what the Magna Carta was
what the English Civil War was
why Benjamin Franklin was considered a great man before the American Revolution
who Antione Laviousier, Joseph Priestly, Faraway, or Maxwell were
anything but E=mc^2 about Einstein
how batteries work
what the voltage of a AA battery is
that antimatter is real
what the Large Hadron Collider is
Most of them
didn’t know what a meter is
didn’t know what a web browser is
didn’t know how to save programs except with the preset defaults
didn’t know their computer could do subscripts or superscripts
didn’t know the war with Japan was ended when we used nuclear weapons on Japan
I am having to teach two extra classes for the freshmen to combat their ignorance and give them a fighting chance in college. It would be nice if people would stop excusing and enabling it. “Jaywalking” isn’t just a Tonight Show skit, I have to live it.
Michael, we are making the same arguement from a different pov. I know exactly what you arre talking about and wake up to days where I feel exactly like you do on this point. But most days, I get frustrated because it seems like we are doing nothing to change this other than blame the young people. For most people, critical thinking is a learned skill that no one is teaching them. I have 21 year olds in my life that ask me the kinds of questions all the time that make me think… how did the education system let them down so badly? These kids graduated. How the hell did that happen? I know one boy who graduated grade 12 already when I found out he could not actually read! We are graduating kids all the time without actually teaching them to think and often, when they do think and end up down a wrong path, we blame them for it when really, they were not given the skills to make a different decision.
Yesterday, this particular issue made my head explode. I was mad at Huffington, mad at Daily Mail and generally hating people in general. You took the hit for that and I really do apologize. I don’t ever want to wake up everyday thinking the way you do in your comment because I don’t think they are to blame and I do think what happened to Ms. Ford was literally disgusting. When you said you understood it, I went ballistic. I will try not to let that happen again. Next time, I will go visit the yoga mat before I respond. I still can’t agree with you though. If you have students arriving to you that cannot wrap their head around the work, that is not their fault. We have seriously let them down.
It was bad enough that when I was in University, my biology professor felt he had to give a portion of the mark to English, spelling, grammar, etc., because students were arriving unable to write. Now, I know, it is much, much worse. Still, someone needs to teach these kids how to think, how to reason out things, how to research and most importantly in the world of the internet, how to determine if what you are reading is actually based in fact. And it certainly shouldn’t have to be you, at the college level.
I get it Michael, and I don’t know the answer. I couldn’t teach. I don’t have anywhere near the patience required (as if you didn’t notice that!). All I know if that there has to be a better answer than persecuting them for asking questions, stupid or not. And said persecution did not solve a single problem.
I almost left Georgia’s name out of the post. Should I have? It seemed pointless, since sites that have 1000X more visibility were already using her name, and I had to link to them. The Twitter user who flagged the story for me, to his credit, did NOT use her name.
I don’t know the answer to that question, Jack. I know the news organizations shouldn’t have. Nothing irritates me more (can you tell?) than news organizations putting up this kind of crap to shine a light or worse, putting it up and then claiming it is an “opinion piece”. Big surprise if you are going there expecting to find news. As far as I know, you are not affiliated with any news organization. When I come here, I expect to read your opinion. As for using her name or not, I have a huge bee in my bonnet right now on this one, so can’t say what I really think because it might be awhile before I even know that. I hear a yoga mat calling me.
Wow. Were you intending to detail how easy it is to fall into cyber bullying, by going overboard sarcastically judging and attacking someone else, Danielle?
Yes, the Google issue occurred to me. I guess after fighting with my late parents for years over their unwillingness to access the internet to answer simple questions like this (they called me) leads me to be lenient and understanding on that score. Some people just don’t think that way. And she was making conversation, after all—we all ask questions in chit-chat just to have something to say. It’s silly not using Google. It isn’t a transgression worthy of worldwide infamy and lifetime branding as a moron, is it?
On a positive note, she closed her Twitter account.
I am still seeking a good reason for even opening one….
I don’t think Georgia deserved any ridicule. But I think of “social media” as ethics-challenged zones, at least – more like, ethics deserts: There are few oases; this blog is one, even when there is some hard-to-swallow taste in the water. Anonymity is a b*tch. Maybe instead of “social,” a different modifier for “media” fits better – like, “blowcial” – for the “exploding mine” potential, the inherent risk to anyone with the slightest vulnerability of getting a skin-melting acid facial.
What Georgia did reminded me of something some relatives of mine boasted about doing often, when they traveled as tourists very frequently, years ago, to just about every spot on earth. At least, to every spot on earth where someone fluent in English was likely in every crowd. If they needed help for any reason, they went to the most pedestrian-thick spot, and one or more would call out, “DOES ANYONE HERE SPEAK ENGLISH?!” They claimed it worked every time. One could say they were ugly Americans. One could say they were lazy. But one could not fault them for attempting to “exploit their environment.” (These days, I would say anyone doing that is crazy. Would any American woman yell like that nowadays in Cairo or Tehran?)
This should be a no-brainer. Whoever passed on the Tweet was being a jerk – likely got a sense of smug superiority at Georgia’s expense.