thoughts on blogosphere and influence
Is blogging about work ever smart? This is a question I’ve been wondering about a lot now. It started (for me, anyway,) with the Friendster firing but evolved into something bigger after few recent incidents—the “Queen of Sky”/Delta blog and the “EA Spouse” posting—and smaller ones, like a data-loss complaint against a piece of beta software…
It seems like blog culture has hit a wall — the average blogger wants to live in public but doesn’t want to have their public commentary affect what they write about. The thing is, blogs and their influence cannot be denied: think Dan Rather, just for starters. It’s clear that the way news evolves today is either initiated or amplified by activity on blogs, personal or not. Even if they are not quoted directly, they are being used as a rough meter of interest on certain topics. And many personal blogs have evolved into fairly professional endeavors themselves: Boing Boing started as a personal scrapbook, but is now a highly-trafficked “directory of things” that looks and acts more like a publication now, from advertising/sponsorships to presidential candidate endorsements. This was not a conscious plan of the author — it happened because their opinions and editing hit a chord with readers and the readers kept on coming. People who don’t seek an huge audience sometimes get one anyway.
Ultimately, the problem is salience. We know that an experience that comes from a single, vivid account is more salient than any number of summarized accounts—this is part of the availability heuristic. Let’s say a piece of software gets 100 excerpted reviews on how easy it is to use, but you get watch one videotaped interview where a user describes serious difficulties of working with the app and getting support. That taped account will be more influential in your decision that any of the other data on hand. Think about how a news story of a person scamming welfare affects your opinion of all welfare recipients or a story of a corporation that violates environmental laws affects your opinion of all corporations, even when there’s data that shows these are isolated events.
So it is with blogs as well, I think—even more so when user comments are present—because often these are not left as summary comments. These experiences often span more than one entry, each one spawning dozens of comments where author and readers take the personal experience and shape it into a shared one. It’s why I would think corporations would be quick to stop such internal reporting through blogs. The firings themselves have seemed pretty harsh compared to what’s been said, but then again — if someone in a boardroom has to defend themselves from a comment off an employee’s blog because another member found it online, I can understand why they’d be very, very upset about it.
Why do people feel the need to put private journals on the public internet? I don’t know, but I can only imagine this issue will be addressed not through legislation, but popular culture — that is to say, I don’t expect any special work protections for bloggers. At some point either the culture paradigm-shifts and accepts a new attitude of appropriateness towards diary-style blogs or it stays the way it is, and employees must be careful about what they say about their employers publicly…as they’ve always had to. Blogging=publishing. That’s the magic of internet, but yet with publishing comes an accountability for what’s been published, unless you stand under the umbrella of anonymity.
And as your mom said, if you don’t have anything nice to say….
