Intern? Bloggers Need Not Apply

westlake writes "Short, funny, and to the point, a good read from the NYT about the realities of blogging in the corporate world." From the article: "Most experienced employees know: Thou Shalt Not Blab About the Company's Internal Business. But the line between what is public and what is private is increasingly fuzzy for young people comfortable with broadcasting nearly every aspect of their lives on the Web, posting pictures of their grandmother at graduation next to one of them eating whipped cream off a woman's belly. For them, shifting from a like-minded audience of peers to an intergenerational, hierarchical workplace can be jarring."

Comments

A chilling future

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

OK, I've heard the "information wants to be free" mantra a zillion times, and I've met my fair share of people who think their right to free speech (no matter what they're saying and what the consequences will be) trumps anything else.

I've seen an absurd story on the news today about a British woman who was prosecuted for indecent exposure, because she had the audacity to sunbathe nude in her own garden. (She was acquitted, but the comments by both the public prosecutor and the judge were profoundly inappropriate, and no-one seems to have taken any action against the "offended" neighbour who videoed the nude sunbather without her permission - something that probably is illegal under the recent Sexual Offences Act.)

You know the thing that really scared me today? A professor (in the UK sense, i.e., a very senior academic) talking about the "semantic web" and implying that in a few years, everyone will have a unique "Internet ID", and everything from their personal details to pictures of their wedding will be on-line for all to look up, instantly and reliably.

Choosing to share your personal information with the world is one thing, though I suspect a great many of the enthusiastic youngsters supporting trendy web sites today will regret it one day. Choosing to share others' personal information with the world is an entirely different thing, and I'm not sure I want to live in a world where everything about you is assumed to be public knowledge.

Maybe I'm just biased, since a bitter ex of mine did once post intimate and formerly private personal messages on her blog (but edited and with modified dates). It just seems to me that this sort of thing is happening ever more often: it's assumed that no-one you deal with has a private life, and if you know it, it's perfectly fine to share it with others. I guess the whole posting confidential company information thing is just another nail in the coffin: as the saying goes, privacy is dead, and we have killed it.

It's tragic, and it's even more tragic that most people don't even realise. Yet.