be careful what you blog about
Just a quick thought as I’m in the middle of exams:
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.It seems now days that the information that people on their web2.0 profiles (myspace, facebook, etc) is worth printing in the newspaper.
Take the terrible shootings that have happened in Melbourne, I just read in the paper that the brother of the girl that was shot was asked about the risqué photos of her on her myspace site, and also published that she had listed herself as being “bi”, and the fact that she likes porn.
Now I’m all for reporting the truth, but really, do we need to know these things? The poor girl’s in hospital! Also, haven’t these journalists been to myspace before?! There are 15 year old girls from my old high school who have risqué photos and talk about how they think they might be bi. Perhaps the girls involved in the shootings do not mind such things being published in the newspaper, but I am certain that many people are live through an alter ego on the net, and would not necessarily want their family, employer, and general society finding out about these things in this unbalanced portrayal of who they are.
It’s obvious that whatever you blog or put on myspace can be viewed by anyone, but people rely on the relative anonymity that comes from the fact that you are on just one page of the billions upon billions. There is also a difference between putting something on myspace, where it’s most likely that only your friends and random strangers will read it, and it being on the second page of The Age.
June 23rd, 2007 at 2:12 am
in a google world, nothing is safe if it exists in e- form. People marvel at google but then suddenly turn on it when it’s used to do things they’re not so comfortable with.
In another way though it’s in the spirit of the insta-celeb culture that we live in.
June 24th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
More like ‘insta-mini-celeb’. I mean, it’s not even 15 minutes of fame anymore, it’s more like 2 minutes. People are in a single news story that says something about blogging, and then that’s it, all done.
And it’s not Google’s fault in particular, it’s just that it is new. Okay, not just that it’s new, but I see that many of the previous generation are the ones who object to these things where the younger generation (adults, not teens) are more accepting.
Now, whether that’s because they fully understand the ramifications of things like privacy is still to be seen.