Was a line crossed?
And if there was, who’s line was it anyway? (see what I did there? No? Oh well). Let me see if I can explain what I’m talking about.
Avid readers of The New Wolfs Howl (I know there are a couple) may notice that there’s a post missing from the site at the moment; check your feed reader and you should be able to work out which one I’m talking about. It’s a post that I wrote about a new website that is related to the industry I work in. We’ve been having some dealings with them at work, and after various correspondence that’s gone back and forwards between the two organisations, I wrote my post about how I didn’t think that what they were saying to businesses tallied with what they were saying to their website users.
Now, there’s something I would like to make clear at this point. The post I wrote on this subject (indeed, all of the posts that I write, whatever the subject) was my own point of view and, as such, cannot be said to be the opinion of the company I work for, nor endorsed by them. But, the content of this particular post was informed by the correspondence I’d had at work.
Today, the PR company behind the website concerned emailed me at work, asking for the post to be taken down because by putting it up I had breached (for want of a better phrase) professional etiquette, in addition to making factually incorrect statements. We’ll come back to that second bit in a moment, but let’s take the issue of professional etiquette first.
I think it’s an important question for bloggers and I know that there have been some famous cases in the not too distant past where people have been removed from their jobs for what they’ve written on their blogs. I intended to write a post about what I perceived to be a conflict between the private face and the public face of a particular website. As a consumer, I would normally only see the public face but as someone who works in the industry, I got to see the private face and to me they didn’t gel. So I wrote about it - from a consumer point of view - to make other people aware. Perhaps I didn’t write in a particularly complementary way, perhaps I should have written to the website company first, perhaps I should have got the OK from my employer first. Whatever I should have done, I went ahead and wrote the post.
What’s interesting to me now is whether, by asking me to take down the post, the website has censored this blog - or whether I crossed a line that shouldn’t have been crossed and they have every right to request it be taken down. I’d be really interested in hearing your opinion.
Of course, by asking for it to be taken down they get no opportunity to correct the factual errors that I may have made. It also gives them no opportunity to respond publicly to the opinions that I put forward (yes, they’ve done so privately but surely better for them to do it publicly through the comments?). For any facts that I got wrong, I apologise (but the information I had available at the time indicated that my facts were correct) but please don’t ask me to apologise for my opinion.
To tell or not to tell? That is the question…
I’ve been blogging for about nine months now; long enough to feel like I know what I’m doing, and to have developed a certain way of writing, and even to have built up a bit of an audience (thank you) but in certain other ways I’m still very much a newbie.
One of the things that I’m still unsure about, and which I’d like your input on if you feel moved to give it, is the issue of censorship. Not so much traditional censorship of bad language, or “adult content” but more internal censorship of what you write. Do you have that barrier that sometimes descends as you start to write, which goes “You know, maybe it would be better if you didn’t write that.”
You may have noticed that, while I have mentioned the company I work for and the products we sell, I don’t write about my experiences at work. The main reason for this is that nothing really happens that is worth writing about, but another reason is that I know that one of my friends from work occasionally reads The Wolf’s Howl; the situation might arise where I write something about the job that he doesn’t agree with, which might cause problems in our working relationship. Unlikely, but it could happen.
Another area that I don’t write about is my personal relationships. I’ve been toying with the idea of writing about a couple of incidents from the past, which every now and again re-surface for a few weeks just to torment me. The thought of writing them down often occurs at these times, to try and exorcise the demons as it were. But, apart from not really being able to find the words, I haven’t written them because that internal barrier comes down.
It’s strange; I think the thing that bothers me about it is that these are things I haven’t told to the people that I’m closest to - yet I’m thinking of writing a blog post that has the potential to be read by millions of complete strangers. I wouldn’t care about them reading the posts, but if someone I knew read them I’d be… embarrassed is probably the best word.
So maybe it’s not censorship. Maybe it’s this conflicted feeling that stops me writing about things; the stupid git at work who can’t even put a damn label on the right way round, the night I was 17 and made a choice that I wouldn’t make now or the night I was 19 and made a choice I really wish I hadn’t made.
But maybe it’s just that I can’t find the right words to really get across what I mean.
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