Shocked and Appalled
Reading the deliciously informative metafilter today, I stumbled across a link to this blog. It turns out, so the story goes, that this man was fired from his job due to comments made on his blog (scroll down through the article to get to the comments). Now. Being a blogger myself, and in fact, a blogger that works at a bookstore, I too have made nasty comments about my boss and my job online in my own time. Does this mean I could get fired? According to the head honchos at 'Bastardstones', it does.
To parrot things that are posted on his blog and in the letter posted by a writer familiar with him in a work setting, this is a gross violation of freedom of speech and frankly made me feel slightly ill when I read it. The idea of a blog is that one can be (more-or-less) anonymous and post rantings, ramblings and general randomness of one's life. The internet itself is a bastion of free-speech. We can say what we want. My biggest problem is the scary infiltration of the public sphere into private life that we are seeing here. Could this be the wave of the future? There was once a time when the things going on behind closed doors would remain there. The philanderings of a President were no more cause for national alarm than those of Mr. and Mrs. Jones in Anytown U.S.A. Suddenly we are overwhelmed with information, and access to information, and suddenly everybody's information has become front page news. Suddenly its no longer restricted to the private actions of celebrities, or the comments of public officials (for the record, he is a moron). Mr. and Mrs. Jones should watch out, because one out of line comment on their private blog about their public lives could land them on the dole.
This is not free speech, this is bullshit. This incident (and not the only one!) shows the blatant disregard for freedom and individual rights that has swept into the world on the coat-tails of the New Millennium. This is me formally lodging my complaint. It is our right to post what we wish, just as it is our right to say what we wish.
Christ. I would expect this sort of bastardization of freedom in the United States, but I thought better of Great Britain.
To parrot things that are posted on his blog and in the letter posted by a writer familiar with him in a work setting, this is a gross violation of freedom of speech and frankly made me feel slightly ill when I read it. The idea of a blog is that one can be (more-or-less) anonymous and post rantings, ramblings and general randomness of one's life. The internet itself is a bastion of free-speech. We can say what we want. My biggest problem is the scary infiltration of the public sphere into private life that we are seeing here. Could this be the wave of the future? There was once a time when the things going on behind closed doors would remain there. The philanderings of a President were no more cause for national alarm than those of Mr. and Mrs. Jones in Anytown U.S.A. Suddenly we are overwhelmed with information, and access to information, and suddenly everybody's information has become front page news. Suddenly its no longer restricted to the private actions of celebrities, or the comments of public officials (for the record, he is a moron). Mr. and Mrs. Jones should watch out, because one out of line comment on their private blog about their public lives could land them on the dole.
This is not free speech, this is bullshit. This incident (and not the only one!) shows the blatant disregard for freedom and individual rights that has swept into the world on the coat-tails of the New Millennium. This is me formally lodging my complaint. It is our right to post what we wish, just as it is our right to say what we wish.
Christ. I would expect this sort of bastardization of freedom in the United States, but I thought better of Great Britain.
posted by Care @ 4:30 p.m.
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