On the Public Nature of Internet Documents

I had class this weekend. There are few things in academia worse than the "Weekend Intensive" class format, at least as practiced at Emporia State University. It's mentally painful and physically exhausting. (The mental pain comes less from grappling with "big issues" and from from trying to keep one's brain from completely atrophying.)

The big news on campus was that one of my classmates had been penning a tell-all blog. Sadly, it was less about the program and more about her slutty personal life. Still, she was afraid it would get out more than it had and deleted it. But may Yahweh preserve the Internet, Yahoo had cached it.

This whole incident begs several questions. Why does one get mad when someone "unintended" reads their blog? It makes no sense. You are publishing it. You are creating it in public places. People are going to eventually see it. If you want to type a diary on a computer, do that. But don't get all hysterical when people read your thoughts when you post them in a public place and, for the sake of all that's holy, don't put something up you don't want someone--anyone--to see.

I mean, this little blog of mine that I've played with for a few months is hardly the stuff of great intellectual fervor (neither is a true blog, by most any stretch of the definition). Yet, I don't care who reads it; it's in the public eye. My private thoughts are private or shared with only a few confidantes (often in e-mail, still not the best way). I know better than to post them for the world to see and then go ballistic when they are, in fact, seen. In all honesty, I knew this before I started in a program designed to make an "information professional" out of me. But if I hadn't, I think something would probably have sunk in at some point during my sojourns at Emporia.