I was watching a documentary about WikiLeaks the other day, and it made me wonder about the language we use to describe the act of revealing secrets. When we were young, it was telling tales, and in the corporate environment the person doing the telling has long been known as a whistle blower. But with the mechanism for lifting the lid on clandestine activities now so often electronic rather than physical, maybe we need a technological term instead? Perhaps ‘e-shock’ from email, or ‘scandal feed’ from RSS Feed‘? Or what about ‘e-gate’ and ‘e-gating’, using the suffix -gate, like Watergate in the 1970s and bigotgate during last year’s UK election campaign? I’m sure there are better ideas out there – what do you think?
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