Dear Abby of all people jumps into the debate over blogging. This debate tends to boil down to two equally ridiculous camps.
On the one side are the people who argue that you’d have to be insane to actually maintain a weblog or personal website. Don’t you know that potential employers could read your website and decide not to hire you based on it?
On the other side are people who think that they have an entitlement to post pretty much anything they want in a public forum and should never be held accountable for their statements. These are the people who write about how annoying their co-workers are or employers are, and then act surprised when they are reprimanded or even fired for their actions.
For the most part, I have no sympathy for these folks. I cannot imagine publicly posting about the ups and downs I experience in my job, even in vague terms, unless it was explicitly authorized by my employer (as some of Microsoft’s employees do, for example). I know if someone I worked with was publicly writing about their work experiences it would be very difficult to build any sort of trust with that person. Work environments are extremely artificial in that they bring together people from very diverse backgrounds with diverse motivations to accomplish a specific task or set of tasks. That makes it difficult enough for things to run smoothly without worrying that what you said in a meeting this morning is going to show up on someone’s Live Journal.
If criticism of blogging stopped there, I’d more than agree with it. But a number of critics go much further. There has been a series of articles published The Chronicle of Higher Education, for example, which have argued that those considering careers in higher education are killing their chances if they’re blogging. In one op-ed piece, for example, an anonymous writer mentioned a hiring committee considering hiring an individual to fill a vacant teaching position. This applicant actually mentioned his blog, and some members of the review committee visited the site. Based on what they found, they chose to pass on him.
According to the anonymous author,
But the site quickly revealed that the true passion of said blogger’s life was not academe at all, but the minutiae of software systems, server hardware, and other tech exotica. It’s one thing to be proficient in Microsoft Office applications or HTML, but we can’t afford to have our new hire ditching us to hang out in computer science after a few weeks on the job.
That, of course, is an extremely presumptuous judgment and relies on an odd thought process. On the one hand, the blogger who writes about his research, department, etc. would be seen as using his blog to write about private matters. On the other hand, by focusing on something outside of his day job, he was seen as not being serious about his primary area of study. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Among academic-oriented blogs, it is fascinating to see how many professors feel compelled to remain anonymously despite the constant mantra about “academic freedom”.
I tend to be pretty laissez-faire about this sort of thing. After all, someone could read this blog and decide they don’t want to hire someone whose still collecting action figures and playing MMOPRGs as he’s approaching 40. As far as I’m concerned, though, that’s not necessarily a bad thing as I’m not sure I want to work for people who worry about those sort of things.
It is a shame that with all the talk about diversity in the workplace that once you get past race and sex some people still expect everyone they work with to be out of the same cookie cutter mold.