Talking about WikiLeaks on Facebook or Twitter could endanger your job prospects, a State Department official warned students at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs this week.Nothing has shaken power like this in a very long time. And who knew the disruption would happen in the area of a dying profession, journalism.An email from SIPA's Office of Career Services went out Tuesday afternoon with a caution from the official, an alumnus of the school. Students who will be applying for jobs in the federal government could jeopardize their prospects by posting links to WikiLeaks online, or even by discussing the leaked documents on social networking sites, the official was quoted as saying.
An email from a friend:
WikiLeaks is to journalism what hiphop once was to music. As hiphop placed the whole idea of music into question (people thought it wasn't even music), WikiLeaks places journalism into question (those in power declare it's not journalism at all but a corruption of it).
At a time of crisis one is alert to the least signals, so Wikileaks brought to mind the forgotten avantgarde. We know, for instance, that forces of change arrive unexpectedly from the outside. But they don't arrive very frequently. When I was in my twenties, drugs completely bowled us over. A decade before that it was rock 'n roll. And before that, the New York hipster and the beats. In every case, although it came from outside, it depended on an underground avantgarde to penetrate.What are the isolated cadres of your generation? Hip-hop, and also the hackers that split off to immerse themselves in an autonomous information sharing system.
What will happen next?
