Trust, freedom, friendship and the Internet
A blog I very much enjoy reading may have to go underground. The author is a teacher, and one of her students stumbled across it. She mentions that under normal circumstances, she might worry less about it because she could defend anything that might raise eyebrows on freedom-of-speech grounds ... but she's overseas, in a place where "freedom of speech" doesn't exactly stir patriotic fervor.

Bringing this back around to Texas: It reminded me of some of my own sudden Net-driven paranoia, and a sad observation.

I know that anything you type can and will be used against you if somebody can find it, and if it's in a computer, somebody can always find it if they look hard enough. Therefore I rarely blog (can you use "blog" as a verb?) at work. I probably shouldn't read blogs as often as I do at work, but I do; usually, they're the most interesting things I read all day.

Further, to protect the innocent, I don't link to other people's personal sites without express written consent (and sometimes not even then, just to be cautious), and I don't post links to my employer's web site. I keep personally identifiable details to a bare, almost laughable minimum in the posts, although if you read deep enough, you can probably piece together most of what you'd need to know about me.

I only very recently became comfortable enough with what I was writing (both its quality and its suitablility for mass consumption) to reveal the existence of the site outside of a very close circle of long-time friends (literally, three people).

A fellow blogger -- also a family member, the person who inspired me to do this (and who claims me as his original insipration; to him I say, no, thank YOU) recently posted a link to this site on his site. I am a daily reader of the other sites to which he links. It's good to be among that company. It's mostly a large circle of his close friends; most happen to be his current and former co-workers.

Which leads me to the sad observation: Aside from a very few people, I can't think of any of my current co-workers who I would want reading this -- or who would care enough to do so. It's one of the downsides of working for a large company; the percentage of my co-workers who I could even pick out a lineup is pretty small compared to places I've worked in the past.

I also work in a newly created position in a small department. There are four other people who do essentially what I do (i.e., we all report to the same person), but we don't sit together and we don't really work the same hours. Nobody quite knows where we fit into the Very Militaristic Newsroom Hierarchy (are we managers? editors? artists? flunkies?), so nobody knows whether or not to trust us. And though the six of us worked very closely on a large project for eight months, we've kind of scattered since then. We don't send a lot of gag e-mails to each other; we don't go out to lunch very often; we don't do most of the camaraderie-building things that most traditional workgroups do.

I miss that, a lot. It could be argued strongly that I should be somewhat less pathetic and actually try to get some friends outside of work, but anybody who works non-traditional hours understands how difficult that can be. (I am a rare exception: I'm not married to a fellow journalist. There's a reason why so many others are.) Until I do become less pathetic, I'll read blogs.

People who blog (there's that verb again) do so for highly personal reasons, and then they make it generally available to the entire world. That's why it's such an interesting medium. It's a shame when self-expression has to lead to self-censorship. But I understand why it does. I hope all of my daily reads stay available as long as possible. And to those of you who give up a minute or two of your life that you'll never get back to read this stuff, a sincere thanks.