The Dangers of Blogging

But for all the good that blogging brings, it too has its share of potential dangers.  True there have been cases of internet stalking, and many times kids don't act wisely when online and maybe give away too much of their information to strangers or make friends with someone before knowing anything about them.  As one newspaper report has it, blogging  has become “a paedophile's dream” (BBC News, 2005)  The Scottish Parliament has recently created a Justice 1 Committee to examine a bill to create the specific offence of "grooming" and bringing in 10-year jail terms for meeting children for sex. Rachel O'Connell, a psychologist, warns that such adults often use weblogs to learn about children.

O’Connell points out that the emergence of moblogs - mobile weblogs - allowed even faster transfer of pictures to the internet using mobile telephones with cameras, arguing that “This is just a paedophile's dream because you have children uploading pictures, giving out details of their everyday life because it's an online journal,” for the parameters of grooming are now about to alter whereby they don't necessarily have to have contact with the child. (BBC News, 2005).

Blogging can also hurt workers, for numerous cases have started appearing in the news in which bloggers are into trouble for blog posts they write on their own time; namely those posts are about their jobs and co-workers.  Hence, blogging about work, can get an employee in as much trouble as blogging from work.

The issue of bloggers being fired for what they write in their blogs has been around since the first legal case in 2002, when a blogger named Heather Armstrong was fired for complaining about her job on her blog, dooce.com.   Afterwards, the blogosphere coined the term “getting dooced” to describe getting fired for blogging about work.  But the phenomenon of “doocing” became major news in 2005, when several companies fired employees not for their work, but for what they wrote online after work.  The most famous example, because it involved a big and powerful company, was the case of Mark Jen, an employee of the leading online search engine, Google.

When Jen joined Google, he created a blog, ninetyninezeros, which he described as “a personal journal of my life at google.”  The blog, written in his spare time, described what he did at Google, the orientation process, the way the company was managed, and other details about the experience of working at Google.

One of Jen’s posts dealt with Google’s system of benefits, including free meals and on-site doctors, and with the upside and downside of this way of distributing benefits: “Every 'benefit' is on site so you never leave work… between all these devices designed to make us stay at work, they might as well just have dorms on campus that all employees are required to live in” (Weinman, 2005).  He also mentioned that Google’s health care plan was not as good as Microsoft’s (his previous employer). Google’s management felt that this and other posts on Jen’s blog were problematic, for the leaked to the public the inner workings of the company.

Jen’s employers asked him to remove from his blog any posts that could be construed as giving away company secrets, and he did so.  Nonetheless, even after he had removed that material, Jen was fired two days later, and, as he wrote on his blog, “either directly or indirectly, my blog was the reason” (Weinman,  2005). 

Consquently, the firing of Mark Jen caused great dismay throughout the blogosphere, where bloggers worried that they might be next to lose their jobs over an ill-advised comment about work.  And the biggest problem was that no one seemed to know what the rules were when it came to blogging about work – not even the people who had been fired for it (Weinman, 2005).

Blogging can get one fired, but many people are not aware that blogs can also prevent them from getting hired, for a job candidate's blog is more accessible to the search committee than most might think. It can be hard to lay your hands on an obscure journal or book chapter, but the applicant's blog is readily available for any computer with a connection.

Because a blog can easily become a therapeutic outlet, a place to vent one’s frustrations, it becomes an open diary or confessional booth, where inward thoughts are publicly aired.  Because of this phenomenon, Ivan Tribble warns that job seekers who are also bloggers may have a tough road ahead (Tribble, 2005).

Although a blog may appear as a harmless outlet, its content is widely available for those who choose to search. Even if a candidate decides to take off his or her blog offline during a his or her job application process, Google and other search engines store cached data of their prior contents. So that unscripted rant might still turn up for potential employers to search.

The content of the blog may be less worrisome than the fact of the blog itself.  In fact, because of the recent increase of lawsuits due to blogging, employers sometimes express concern that a blogger who join their staff might air departmental dirty laundry (real or imagined) on the cyber clothesline for the world to see (Tribble, 2005).