10/05/2006

Ugh.

I have lots of stuff to say but I am so frustrated. I was going to try to clear my mind a bit, looking at friend's web pages and stuff, but Firefox and my computer had a fight. I lost all my bookmarks. Stupid.

Something happened this week that made me wonder about the freedom of speech, in a forum such as a blog, and one's profession. I've read all sorts of articles on military websites about people getting in trouble, even being court marshaled for stuff they write on their blogs. Most of the time those things make sense to me, because they have important policies on operation security. Like if your are going to Iraq you can't give people information on when you are going to be doing what and where, because it potentially exposes the plans of your unit to the enemy, especially when those things are written in a public area like the Internet. But until this week I had only thought a bit about what could happen in a normal job.
I very purposely choose not to write names of people I work with, or where I work or anything of that sort, simply because I don't think it would be polite to my coworkers. I know I personally wouldn't want someone to use my name frivolously on the Internet. It makes me concerned though, that this has come up in my workplace. I have done everything I can to make sure that my blog is not search able for my employer, just in case they don't like what I write. But it's also absurd to me to do this because of how incredibly wrong I think it is. I mean even if a person writing about their personal experiences at work had used their company name, and even the first names of co-workers, I don't think that it would be justifiable to fire that person for keeping a blog. I understand the company's side of it to some extent, that you could actually tarnish the image of the business if you said something bad enough. And when I really think about it I don't think that an employer could really do it, but if you look on the Internet there are stories of it occurring, and I think for any blogger who herd it suggested, it is a frightening thought.

1 comment:

Clinton said...

Funny, that.

I had a similar problem with my xanga a year ago and that was regarding something that I wrote the year BEFORE that one and had since then, privatized so that no one could read it anymore (unless they clicked on the cached entry, apparently.)

I recount my personal reasons for pseudonymity here...