One of my favourite things to do while avoiding either working or cleaning is browsing around the internet. Lately, Facebook has been by fascination. Tehre is a seemingly endless stream of profiles, comments, details, and notes. However, playing around has confirmed what I already knew.
I read a note (and no, I'm not saying whose it was) that surprised me a little, so I poked around ad realixed that I could read any note in which someone tagged one of my friends. How that works is, if I say something like "So I went out with Mike last night, and he was so drunk he ended up....." and tagged Mike, then all his friends could read the note. Like, his mother. Or his girlfriend. Or.... the list goes on. By the way, I made that up. Last night I saw a movie with friends.
And here is what inspired this rant: http://www.thestar.com/News/article/195823. The boy in this article got expelled for dissing his Vice Principal in a facebook group. Which just goes to show - The internet is not anonymous. Should you be punished for something you said with the expectation of privacy? I have no idea. Is this legal. I have no idea. Is it dumb? Yes. Is it hurtful? Yes.
Last year, back when ratemyproffessor.com was having its last hurrah, I made the mistake of looking myself up. Big mistake!! I'm not a bad teacher, but with the promise of anonymity and a failing midterm in their hand, otherwise nice people become mean. BTW, THAT site is not private either - In fact, I've heard of someone losing their job over supposedly anonymous postings.
By now, you've all heard countless horror stories about people getting fired, explelled, outed or worse, due to blogs and notes and comments. And yet, I can still surf through embarrasingly personal accounts of pretty much anything on the web. For my friends with blogs - this doesn't include you. Your musings on economic policy or the difficulty of Romanian translation are interesting without being the least bit scandelous.
So, moral of the story: If you must write about people in your blog, and its anything yours or their grandmothers and bosses shouldn't read, don't write it. And, if you must, use the old fishbowl convention of using intitials or clever nicknames... those in the know get it, and those that shouldn't be reading it will (hopefully) have no idea.
Amy
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1 comment:
Amen to that!
I have to add something though -- I'm simultaneously becoming addicted to, and developing a hatred for, academic blogs. Honestly, they're the most depressing things, and frankly, all academics sound the same in their blogs.
And now to go back to translating Romanian....
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