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October 04, 2005

Think before you blog.

As I've said a few times before, in a few different places: if you have any interest in higher education at all, and you don't read Inside Higher Ed, you should. Not only do you get news and notes from academia in general, but you get little feature tidbits about real pitfalls of modern academic life.

This is a very important case in point:

Last year, three students had to face the University of Mississippi’s judicial system after campus police officers found out they had created a group on the Facebook, an online network for college students, that consisted of people who wanted to sleep with a particular professor.

So when a student asked Thomas Reardon, dean of students at Ole Miss, for a recommendation, he decided to take a spin through Facebook. Sure enough, he found the student had posted something that "lacked judgment," he said. Reardon still wrote the recommendation, but he "felt obligated to call the student in and tell him about it."

For a generation of students who grew up with blogs, online journals, and peer-to-peer sites, the Internet has become an arena to write, post and link all the things they might not be able to express normally. The difficulty now, for some, is realizing that, more and more, their "peers" include professors, administrators, prospective employers, and sometimes law enforcement personnel. Whereas administrators used to tell students to take the "Hey dude" messages off their answering machines during job hunting seasons, now some students are being told to watch their digital profiles.

My response, of course, is: It's true, it's true.

You can't assume that anybody is not reading your blog. I have to keep in mind, when I'm writing this, that this might be read by anybody ranging from students, superiors, pastors, fellow parishoners, long lost acquaintances...even daughters. And I have to temper my words accordingly.

The thing is, I don't believe the correct response is to pull stuff down, not if your desire is to actually have your words - your ideas - influence people and events. All of my stuff from my previous blogging existence is still online (you might have to scroll down to the page's bottom or see previous 20 entries to see the truly ancient stuff.) You're even welcome to have a look. It's from a previous existence, so there is some raw stuff on there and some ill-advised stuff on there, but it's out there, warts and all, so you can see what I was like then I was "growing up."

But we do grow up. All of us, as loath as we are to admit it sometimes.

So here's the question: Which of the words that we speak are going to come back to bite us at the end of the day? What things do we say online that really don't need to be online in the first place, for all the world to see?

There are a couple of particular topics right now that I could speak to directly. Honestly, though, I don't think I have to, because of that wonderful old adage called "if the shoe fits, wear it." You make your own online decisions, and your conscience is a pretty good guide to tell you if you're making the right ones or the wrong ones. If you know what I'm talking about, all well and good (and feel free to call me out and disagree if needed). If you don't know what I'm talking about, that's not necessarily a bad thing. (And if you think you know what I'm talking about and you aren't sure, don't jump to conclusions - I might well be thinking of something COMPLETELY different. In fact, I probably am.)

(Of course, there are examples of where you can be so cagey with the you-think-you-know-but-you-really-don't-know motif that it gets flat out annoying to read. The entire last paragraph, for instance.)

I think this is what I'm trying to get at. I want my words to be an open book. I want you to get a sense, by reading this, of what I truly believe, of what I truly am, of how I truly live my life. But I don't want to do that at the expense of any other person - I want to respect other individuals, their individual lives, and the things that they would rather not see the light of day in what I write. (This, by the way, is a large part of the reason I don't write about stuff that goes on at home anymore - because my wife saw some of the things I wrote about that in a previous experience, and as much as I tried to focus what I wrote about what went on in my mind, her name turned up and she got uncomfortable in that.)

It seems like a tightrope, doesn't it? Well, it is.

A couple of other notes, and apologies that I've successfully disjointed this post beyond all recognition:

Posted by Chuck at October 4, 2005 12:58 PM

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Comments

just a quiz-bowler? *sniff*

but otherwise, my response to this post is, as always: ROCK ON.

"I want you to get a sense, by reading this, of what I truly believe, of what I truly am, of how I truly live my life. But I don't want to do that at the expense of any other person - I want to respect other individuals, their individual lives, and the things that they would rather not see the light of day in what I write."

Posted by: catie at October 4, 2005 08:49 PM