leading a publicly-accessible life

[cellio]

I was recently involved in a conversation about posting to journals (or other internet fora) and how it's important to be careful out there. I don't know that I'll say anything here that's new to most of you, but I'm going to ramble anyway.

Posts to mailing lists, newsgroups (remember those?), journals, blogs, and so on are, potentially, forever. I feel bad for the high-school and college students (and sometimes beyond) who haven't learned that yet and are going to be appalled by what they find in archives in a decade. But, of course, the same thing could happen to me too -- I'm older and I hope somewhat wiser, but that doesn't mean I'll never make a mistake. Being mindful of it, though, is a big first step.

Some people use pseudonyms or try to be anonymous on the net. When I created this journal I very briefly considered using a pseudonym, but I decided to use my real name. One reason is that part of the point of a public journal is for friends to be able to identify me. That doesn't mean I advertise this journal widely, and I try to keep it out of search engines (which doesn't work so well with RSS feeds, so that's probably doomed now). But when people I know stumble across it, I'd usually like them to know it's me. And I don't want to keep a friends-locked journal, though I do have locked entries, because I want to be able to meet new people through this medium.

There's another reason I'm not anonymous. I do not want to be lulled into the false sense of complacency that might come with a pseudonym. It could lead me to believe that I really am anonymous. A pseudonym lets you be casually anonymous -- your identity is not apparent to the passerby -- but anyone who really wants to figure out who you are can probably do so, at least if you post as much and as deeply as I do. Better for me to admit it up front and be careful in what and how I post.

I mostly don't use outsiders' names in my posts. Sure, given my name, my home page, Google, and a few minutes, you can learn the names of my employer, my synagogue, my rabbi, and probably my parents. These aren't secrets, but in posts I tend to refer to "my synagogue" or "my employer" and so on. (Same with my tags.) If my journal entries are Google fooder, at least that way searches on those entities won't tend to lead here. Someone trying to check up on me via Google will get here; someone trying to check up on my boss won't.

I sometimes face a balancing act between wanting to give credit where it's due and wanting to protect others' identities. If I have a private conversation with someone, that person hasn't generally given me permission to broadcast about it. On the other hand, if he said something nifty, I don't want to take the credit for that thought myself. That's why I sometimes write that I heard this interesting idea and here's my reaction to it. This journal is about me, my reactions, my opinions -- and only secondarily about other people's work that inspires me. I think I'm being fair to the other people in my life. I hope they would agree.

An interesting question (thought experiment) is how I would have to change the way I write on the net if I were in a position that was more publicly-accountable -- school teacher, politician, rabbi, etc.

Comments

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

I've thought about these questions a lot. Especially when I see how much of their private lives people put up on the Internet, and how easy it is to track them down.

Your last question resonates, but for other reasons. For a short time, I was a teacher while I was blogging and reading other people's posts. Now, I never blogged about work, but former students of mine who had graduated from a different school blogged about their lives, and there's a lot they said that I would have been legally bound to report. When adults and children are all on the Internet together, the rules are going to have to adapt.

[cellio]

and there's a lot they said that I would have been legally bound to report

You would have been required to report casually-observed comments? I mean, if a student actually sent you email, or spoke with you directly, that's one thing, but reading a public blog entry seems more like overhearing a conversation on the subway. At what threat level does this kick in? Somewhere between "I am on my way to blow up my school; see my explosives?" and "I wish a meteor would strike my math teacher so I don't have to take today's test" is a line; how do they characterize it?