December 23, 2006

PEOPLE generally seem to know the idiom “think before you speak”, they, however, rarely practise it. Even presidents and head of states, let alone common people, sometimes say more than they should and the situation gets even worse when something like this happens in print. In virtual space one can always offload whatever one publishes on web-logs, however, for the time that these logs do stay online, how and whom gets influenced by it is a concern many bloggers have to deal with in real-time.

Web logs are diaries, both personal and interest or business related, which are created on the internet. To put it more simply, they are ‘blogs’ which are sometimes presented in a chronological order. They were started by an American college student in 1994 and are currently as popular as ever. Bloggers update their blogs almost daily. They write about anything and everything. It’s basically a journal of whatever one wants it to be. With simple user-friendly interfaces blogs are very easy to create. They are either hosted by various blog services such as www.blogger.com (owned by Google) or through blog software such as ‘blogger’. Blogs are visited by millions of internet users for various reasons ranging from genuine interest in various subject areas to simply a dose of world news.

Not only have blogs generated interest among people who want to write about anything they like but they have also acquired a genuine following among people who are passionate about their interests such as politics or even gardening. So if you are looking for general public opinion you might want to visit blogs related to the same topic. Visiting various blogs may change or reinforce your opinion about a particular topic. Let’s suppose you are a bit suspicious of Fox News Network or CNN’s reporting of a specific news story, you can go to various blogs discussing them with alternative perspectives. It may even challenge your own take on the story.

Like anything else though, blogs have their pros and cons. Where they can provide a wealth of information they can also mislead rather conveniently. Without anyone keeping the authenticity of the published material, it is easy to put up biased or simply incorrect information. But the blogger’s reputation is paramount in all this, since writing under pseudonyms doesn’t really help. There are not only ways of identifying bloggers through various hacking techniques but bloggers can also simply expose other bloggers. A student blogger who uses the pseudonym “PolitaKid” to express his views on education, politics and the media says, “Being an anonymous blogger myself, I realise how important anonymity can be to someone. Exposing someone else’s identity is the worst thing a blogger can do, even worse than libelling someone… But, nothing can rectify the fact that a blogger was exposed; it can’t be countered, it can't be disproved. What’s done is done, and it can have a tremendous negative effect on a person’s livelihood”.(http://politakid.blogspot.com/2006/06/my-thoughts-on-blogosphere-anonymity.html)

He goes on to add that he has signed an “Online Integrity Pledge” which means that he will never do such a thing. And if someone else first exposes him only then he will reciprocate. This was PolitaKid’s reaction to some instances where certain anonymous bloggers had to go ‘underground’ and make their blogs offline after being exposed. But anonymous blogging is a contradictory concept, since blogging itself is a public activity.

What “PolitaKid” is referring to is not a ‘virtual’ problem. It has real life implications. For instance, if you are a job seeker who has a blog you will have to think twice about what you write on the web. In a recent article “Bloggers Need Not Apply” in “The Chronicle of Higher Education”, the anonymous writer explained his work on a faculty search committee. He says that blogs had a negative impact on the hiring process. The committee tracked applicants’ blogs on Google and what they found was definitely more than they needed to know. So, he warns job seekers about what they say on their blogs. He repeats his advice in his follow up column titled “They shoot messengers, don’t they?” in “The Chronicle Careers”. He writes, “if ‘be careful what you say’, is good general advice for the job seeker, why is it so controversial to add the word ‘online’? Maintaining the privacy of comments broadcast to the entire computerised world seems disingenuous. Public speech, while certainly free, is still public.”

Public dialogue for bloggers is not that easy to give up though. And being careful isn’t always that simple either. It has become a way of life for them. This is how they respond to their external world. Blogs are like mass emails, so you won’t have to tell everyone the same thing again and again. So when Prof. Michael Berube wanted to respond to being included on the list of the most dangerous professors in America in David Horowitz’s book 101 Professors: The Most Dangerous Professors in America, he didn’t write or call Horowitz instead he wrote a long blog. Similarly another professor simply started up a blog called, “Finally I can die in Peace”! On the other hand another blog was started by professors complaining about being NOT included in Horowitz’s list!

Blogs have made these professors popular among students and increased traffic for them but it may not sit well with administration at the universities or their places of employment. For political science Prof. Daniel Drezner, blogging is an outlet for him and the visitor count lets him know that people are reading which is exciting for a writer. He refers to professors’ blogging as “scholar-blogging”. Drezner blogs on his site, “I’ve published one book, ten refereed journal articles, and a bunch of policy essays, but in all likelihood more people have read this blog than have looked at any of my collected works. That’s simultaneously exciting and depressing.” In spite of his popularity, blogging may have been a factor in him being denied tenure at University of Chicago, Illinois. Although he was granted tenure at Tufts University but he still warns students and academics about the pitfalls of blogging.

Drezner and Politakid are not overestimating the cost of a blog gone public. Anonymity in a public domain simply doesn’t exist. And so blogging under one’s own name is far better than blogging with a pseudonym. At least it will help keep tab on how much is ‘too much information’. But one simply can’t be careful enough since your own words can make or break your reputation in the virtual/real world.