The ghosts in the intertubes
posted in Pop Culture |This morning I read a post on a blog-center (dunno what else to call it? A place that has bunches of bloggers who are paid to blog there?). The post was written by a woman who got involved in a horrible divorce case that featured her husband and MIL and others printing out a year’s worth of posts from her old blog and using them to portray her as a horrible woman who was tearing down her husband and didn’t deserve custody of her kids. The case played out long ago, but today she discussed the fact that post-divorce, her child’s therapist told her that she had read her blog and had known that her husband/MIL/others had found her blog and were reading the posts and printing them out, but had felt it was unethical to tell her so until she was no longer therapising her child.
Anyway.
I mean, aside from that piece of weirdness (okay, your kids’ therapist reads your blog and it’s obvious that issues in the blog are related to the kids’ therapy, but…um…surely it’s okay to say, "Hey! I read your blog!"?)…
The author of this post talked about how she wouldn’t have written those things if she had known her husband and MIL and unknown others were actually reading it.
Hm.
In a similar case, on a private email list I was on a few years ago, one of the posters regularly vented about things her husband did. Most of us knew–in general–that it was venting and meant naught. Unfortunately, one of the other posters had a hate-on for the first poster, and spent a year forwarding bits and pieces from the vents to her husband, anonymously. Naturally, choosing the ugliest, pettiest of vents. Over the year, poster number one became more and more bewildered by how morose her husband was becoming, how distant, how things weren’t what they had been before. Then hubby finally exploded and admitted that someone was forwarding these emails. There was a Big Blow Up in the marriage, accompanied by therapies and lots of discussion, and a Big Blow Up on the list, accompanied by the closure of the list, the hunting down of the person who had done the forwarding, and a big drop in the overall trust level between all these folks. The marriage survived, the list changed, people moved on.
So.
The first…well. Hm. She didn’t know people were reading her blog. She was posting all her vents out on the open Internet. Yes, there are millions of pages of…stuff…on the Internet. But lordy lordy. I avoided the whole question of "what would people think about my posting" in two ways. One way was to just crow to my darling OmegaDad about my blogging. And to my mom. And to others. The other way was to say to myself, when posting, just about the same thing I say to myself most of the time when I’m about to write an angry email or a furious response on a message board: Do I really want to post this? So I sit on it. And a few hours later, usually, the spleen is vented, life is better, I can look at the prompting event, and see it from a different perspective.
(Though when it comes to leaving throat lozenge wrappers all over the house, ahem…No perspective will ever make that acceptable! 
)
Don’t post something on the Internet that you wouldn’t mind seeing in your local newspaper. Or else password protect it from day one and make sure it can’t be indexed by Teh Google or the WayBack Machine. It’s a fairly good rule of thumb.
The second is a different matter. It was, to me, a betrayal of trust among a group of supposed friends. One is putting up a broadside on an often-passed telephone pole near downtown. The other is chit-chatting with your buds in the safety of your living room while playing pinochle or Bunco. One has an implied privacy (the email list); the other doesn’t (a post on the Internet). Both involve a communications gap–one of which was solved by party B asking party A what the heck was going on, the other of which was "solved" by going to court and what sounds to be a nasty custody case.
In general, I have no idea where I’m going with this post, aside from the fact that it is vaguely related to yesterday’s post in topic, and the question of the difference between the two situations–the difference that I see but that others may be quite able to argue isn’t there at all–intrigued me.
Do you see the difference? Or is there one?
Tomorrow: Dinosaur Wars!
