Very interesting thoughts from Caveat Lector. Among other things the author talks about people having "firewalled circles of acquaintance[s]". I have thought about this a lot while blogging. I wonder if a future or even current employer would read my blog decide they didn't like my political beliefs, my humour, my ideas and simply not hire me or subject me to some unspoken penalty. This concern leads me to some amount of self censorship. Not only does this occur from the employer perspective but also friends, aquaintances and family who might not share my religious, ethical, economic or political perspectives.
Perhaps blogging for me only exposes a broader symptom of wanting to refrain from offending people at the cost of sometimes not allowing people to really know who I am. Hmmm.
Then there is the stickier issue of intellectual property. My intellectual output is theoretically subject to the whims of a corporation. Will they ever crack down and tell people they can't blog? Will a future company impose stringent rules about blogging. Hmmm.
For now, I think I'll stick with a certain amount of self censorship. If I'm going to start being more honest and direct, I'll start with face to face relationships where I am not subject to archiving and googling and trackbacks.
One of those people
It strikes me that a lot of the Bad Stuff that happens in these scenarios has to do with carefully firewalled circles of acquaintance meeting unexpectedly, or façades suddenly failing. In my case, ideally, the circles all know each other and if there is a façade, it’s a lot broader and less exclusionary than the typical one.
In other words, no surprises. Folks can’t suddenly find out that I’m one of those people (vegetarians, feminists, leftists, librarians, RPGers—whoever those people are at the moment) and be shocked and horrified. If they’d read CavLec they’d have known all along. Nor can they pretend that I was so duplicitous as to hide my being one of those people from them. It’s all here, open to the world.
Any bosses I have from here on out will get told about CavLec from the get-go. They can read it. I encourage them to. Far better they should know what I am and what I say and what I do up-front, and decide they can live with it. Or discuss honestly with me what they can’t live with; I can be reasonable. What will never happen, though, is what happened to me my last job but one—I will not be told “Oh, sure, write whatever you want” only to land in boiling water when I write something the powers-that-be don’t go for.
--Link
