April 26, 2003
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:A Hostile Environment for 'Asymmetrical Speech'
Ken Layne's and Roger Simon's discussion of blogging prohibited by employers strike a chord for this pseudonymous blogger, but I don't think either of them have captured the entire ugly truth about blogging for the organization man/woman. Here's Layne's take:
In America, the tyrant is the little man presiding over a roomful of employees ruled by Fear. He is the hate-filled middle manager, the brown-nose, the squealer, and especially the corporate mid-sized newspaper editor.
and Simon:
I agree with Layne about those hate-filled middle managers but what about the real bosses, the Murdochs and Turners of the world? "Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one," A. J. Liebling famously said and he was sure right. Now everyone's got his or her own, if he or she wants it. (Readers? That's another question.)So the media plutocracy is also under assault here as much as their underlings, but exactly how is hard to tell. The future is anybody's guess and don't ask me. I'm no Nostradamus. (In fact, Nostradamus was no Nostradamus.) But as that other great journalisto Mencken said, when they say it's not about money, it's about money.
Newspapers and editors are not the only ones that would frown on blogging by employees. In point of fact, many employers can and do object to several threats from blogging:
- loss of profits from ideas and information developed while on the organization payroll (how do you draw the line here?)
- expression of ideas that might bring unwanted publicity to the employer
- potentially unflattering characterizations of the employer, fellow employees and/or customers
- (In regulated industries or government agencies) potential exposure from unsupervised communication with the public
- unproductive use of company time and bandwidth
The typical reaction (for those employers who have even thought to make a weblog policy) to any of these risks is to prohibit the activity without further consideration of its benefits for the blogger or even the organization. This is simple bureaucratic behavior in a litigious environment - low-frequency risks are exaggerated, benefits are ignored. Unfortunately, those low-frequency risks can have high severity. An employee can say or disclose something egregious that then plays a role in a client loss, a hostile environment lawsuit, a regulatory fine or the embarassing public disclosure that surround regulatory investigation (such as the avalanche of silly but reputation-killing Wall Street emails we've endured these last few years).
Imagine reading it back in court
At work I used to have a reputation for "purple prose" in my emails and memos (I was working in the paleolithic pre-email era). I like to recall P.G. Wodehouse similes ("“one of those robust, dynamic girls with the muscles of a welterweight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge.”; "aunt to aunt like mastodons bellowing over primeval swamps"), and make rather vivid descriptions of the companies I visited. The good news was that people actually read my memos.
Occasionally, my old boss would wander over and object. He proposed a rule with regard to everything recorded in writing, "imagine yourself reading it back in court". Given the current regulatory and litigation environment this is a very reasonable principle.
Asymmetrical Speech
On the other hand it is a horrible rule for lively, interesting or enlightening discussion, especially of a socratic nature. Sometimes it is necessary to "try on" a viewpoint you may not support. Sometimes a colorful insult or description livens up a detailed argument. All of these things are viewed as small potential liabilities by the supervisor. It is a terrible rule for social/individual speech as opposed to official speech. In the employer/employee arrangement the line between these two is disappearing. The internet has brought us to the era of "asymmetrical speech", where speech intended as social and individual is considered official because of the potential size of the audience, the permanence with which it is recorded and the ease with which such speech can be found and used against one. Employers would have few objections to an employee running a community newsletter on his own time. Running a website is different primarily for these reasons of exposure*, permanence and accessibility. Until society adjusts to this, blogging will have its dangers.
I view this as part of a particularly evil social trend of creeping criminalization of thought and analysis, but I'll save further discussion for another post.
* I think the exposure is overestimated. Weblogs as a whole have had an impact, but apart from the few bloggers who have made big media appearances, they are a bit like a swarm of ants.
Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at April 26, 2003 2:02 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksRE The Choice: no blogging or get fired.
I'm of two minds on this. I see no harm with blogging if the employee doesn't use the equipment at work to blog, and doesn't use info that the employer considers useful (like a reporter putting details about a story on his blog a few hours before the media outlet he works for puts it on their website).
But if those conditions are violated then I don't have a problem with the business firing the employee.
Some comapnies have an image to maintain. It's money in the bank to them. If you're a warblogger working for the Campaign Against American Hegemony, then you're musings in the blog might just result in a few less donations to the Campaign. Hey, McDonald's is always hiring.
If a private company is simply uncomfortable with the blogger blogging, well it is their company. People are crying that their 1st Amendment rights are being violated, but I don't see any shock troops from the NYT breaking down any doors to destroy servers and shoot dissidents in the head.
Now, is it the right thing for a company to do, fire an employee simply because they're uncomfortable with what is, essentially, a hobby? No. But I don't see how it could be a crime in the vast majority of cases.
My take on it is that I wouldn't want to work for someone who wants to monitor my hobbies and choose which ones are acceptable to them.
Hey, like I said, McDonald's is always hiring!
James
hi mhd,
"* I think the exposure is overestimated. Weblogs as a whole have had an impact, but apart from the few bloggers who have made big media appearances, they are a bit like a swarm of ants."
i wonder if you have read "ender's game" by scott orson card (it is science fiction). chapter 9 has an interesting set of claims as to the effectiveness of blogging. i would be interested in your thoughts.
A writer can only write so many hours a week or she will burnout. A burned out writer will write stilted, dull prose that nobody wants to read. For this reason alone, an employer can limit outside writing by a writer.
On the other hand, if you are a blogger who is a teacher or programmer etc., writing would be a change of pace and freshen your mind.
I don’t think it is wise for a blogger to use her real name. Not only does an alias eliminate problems with employers, it gives you self-protection. You could end up with a crazed stalker on your doorstep because of something you wrote.
The exception to the above rule is a free-lancer who needs the publicity.
Most important of all, don’t use employer equipment or time to maintain your blog. You are supposed to be working.
I don't know if anyone else lives in my netherworld - blogging ON my employer website. I produce a newsletter for my accounting firm, mostly on tax issues, and I decided it looked enough like a blog to turn it into one.
I quickly learned that it is very easy to offend clients and state legislators. The legislators don't bother me, but the clients do. I have to be mindful in every post to try to not offend, without being boring. If I can make it funny, I think it can work.
"Real" bloggers like you and Jane enable me to vent semi-anonymously when I need to in your comment section, without bringing the wrath of clients on my firm.
The potential for annoying customers makes me sympathetic to reasonable employer restrictions on blogging. I would not be amused, for example, if one of our firm employees spent time running a blog on methamphetamine production on company time, using a firm e-mail address. If he does it in anonymously using a Hotmail address, I would never know, unless he works four days straight without sleep or something.
Banning blogging offers a false sense of security to employers. Why? There's always the phone, which has been known to come to the aid and rescue of employees looking to waste time and--horrors--make controversial statements.
"A writer can only write so many hours a week or she will burnout." For some people maybe. (I probably couldn't handle 20 hrs/week of writing, which is a good reason not to seek a job as a writer.) OTOH, there are some writers whose working hours seem to be limited only by the necessity for sleep and food. Isaac Asimov for instance published over 300 books in his lifetime. And part of how he managed that was to write about a lot of different things - fiction and non-fiction, science and history, etc. If one thing was going stale, he just switched to something else for a while.
So maybe blogging would be a way for a writer to get into non-job areas for a while and refresh his mind. If that doesn't work and his job performance suffers, _then_ it's time to crack down.
Of course, one does need to keep enough self-discipline to not spend one's entire working day blogging or trying to keep up with all the other good blogs out there...
Comments are Closed.