RSS feedFollowing on from back dating posts, Sbastien Paquet discusses The freedom to be yourself in public.
Perhaps this is the nature of the blogosphere, but what makes people want to publish intimate details of themselves for the whole world to see? Aside from close friends, who really cares whether someone went on a date last night? I don’t, but it does give me a mental picture of the person who does. I may however be interested in whether they just started a new job, who their friends are, or what their other beliefs are.
This mental picture I get of a weblog author then determines how I interpret what they write, and combined with their actual text, helps me decide whether they are worth listening to or thinking about. I think this is a common, and if not then unconscious, trait in most weblog consumers. What’s more, I’d love my reader client to document and update these mental pictures of people as I read their feeds, without having to go back and read their entire weblog archive.
There are obviously privacy concerns here, yet people still choose to publish a lot of personal details. Why? If anything, it could expose personal attributes which wouldn’t be immediately obvious to an employer from a CV or an interview, or it could help someone with harassment, robbery, deception (re Mitnik) or countless other uses. So why do it? The benefits must of course outweigh the risk, and you could assume the people unconciously do the numbers before posting, but I doubt it.
So how long before bloggers begin faking their online personalities, if they haven’t already? Is the John Doe Weblog you read each day, a real person? And if so, how does this change your interpretation of, or belief in what they write? Fictional weblogs are already starting to appear.
Most of the top bloggers are new to the world of celebrity, and many either don’t realise the amount of information they’re exposing about themselves, or they can’t see what negative implications it may have. I’m not saying it is all bad, it isn’t, but it is still a risk, and I think in many cases is never seriously considered until people are directly affected by it.
In a perfect world, we could all expose ourselves for the common good, but the intelligence and morals of the currently average blogger has unfortunately convinced us of this false nirvana of secure openness. If and when the non-blogging populous at large starts to get involved, we may see this openness start to decrease, to a point where it is fairly uncommon. Assuming of course that it isn’t one of the key premises of blogging. By then, we will already have a permanent record of the intimate details of various individuals. This is exactly what happened when bulletin boards first popped up in the 1980s, and many people got burned pretty bad then as well.
An orphan friend of mine recently traced her mother, based simply on her 35 year old birth certificate. In the space of three weeks, she had discovered her family tree, each family members’ hobbies, their likes and dislikes, where they work, their opinions, who their friends are and countless other facts. She initially used public election records, but was quickly overcome with information overload once she started searching the web. And this was without the help of any personal weblogs, which as we know are very much about to change the whole way we investigate individuals.
I have an unlisted home telephone number, because both my wife and I have had to deal with our own separate semi-celebrity issues in our past. In trialling both a personal and work weblog, I’ve had to question once again what information I give out about myself, and what guidlines I use to decide what I can and should not post. While I feel that I’ve reached a good balance, I still pause before each post, and reflect upon what is about to be added to the jigsaw that is the public picture of me. The open nature of the current blogosphere has given me some reassurances, but like I said, this may just be a false paradise.
Then again, perhaps the nature of the blogosphere means that none of this will be an issue. Bring it on!
(If you think that you rarely give out personal information about yourself, then think again. As an example, on face value this post doesn’t give much away, but from it alone you can deduce that I’m married, I’m hetrosexual, I’ve been a semi-celebrity in the past, I’m probably late 30s, I’m a technologist, I have technical skills or finances for a personal blog, I have a degree of intelligence, I use the Internet a lot, I have a friend who is female and originally orphaned, I have an unlisted telephone number, I am moderately protective of my personal information, I work for Synop, and I either read Sbastien Paquet, or I read someone else who does. What does your weblog give away?)
(Originally posted to Synop weblog.)