Some of you may have seen or been forwarded an email from Laurie Garrett on her experience at WEF/Davos. I wanted to mention that the Laurie Garrett WEF/Davos email has taken on quite a life of it’s own. It was linked to Metafilter.com and then a very intelligent analysis of the discussion surrounding Garrett’s response to the discussion was posted to the Yale Law School weblog.
I have to say that any respect that I did have for Garrett as a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist was trashed by her remarks to the MetaFilter.com community:

“I beg of all of youÛthe Internet addicts of the worldÛto turn off your TVs
and computers now and then and engage the world. Go have actual eye-to-eye
conversations with your family, friends and neighbors. Read a great book.
Argue politics over dinner with friends. Go to City Council meeting. Raise
money for your local public library. Teach your 12-year-old algebra.
Climb a mountain.
Execute a dream.
Be a citizen of the real world.”

I think I’m most offended by Garrett’s assumption that we do not do any of
these things because we use the Internet.
Here’s Garrett’s piece on Bruce Sterling’s website (with Bruce’s comments
interspersed- even he’s playing editor :) because Topica.com has deleted
the original post.
Here’s the original discussion on Garrett’s piece (it’s long):
Here’s a link to Garrett’s email to MetaFilter (via one of the members)
Here’s the follow up to the earlier discussion:
This is definitely a tempest in a teapot, but the privacy, weblog, professional journalism aspects of this story are interesting to me. Yes. it’s sad that one of Garrett’s friends betrayed her trust and forwarded her email on without permission, but I’d be willing to bet money that she didn’t mark her email as private or not-to-be-forwarded. In addition, I’m saddened that a journalist of her caliber could be so ignorant about the power of information and the Internet to disperse it.
p.s. Greg Elin posted it to his site yesterday :)