Blogs: Tools or … tools?

Since blogs attempt to be the subject of much debates and concern at the moment, it seems necessary than an educated opinion should be posted by the community who most uses these resources. While generally our entries are requested to not post companies by name, Myspace.com and Facebook.com are two websites which allow blogging, and I have been asked to post my comments about them. Below is my opinion of the intended purpose to which posters post information, and also my views on the extent to which the information offered has been exploited.

I graduated from college last May, and Facebook.com was becoming increasingly popular towards the end of my student career. I was asked repeatedly to put up information on Facebook.com, and there is an entry which exists to this day. All I offered was contact information in addition to other basic information: my major, what classes I was currently enrolled in, and so on. Facebook.com has offered many people from my past the opportunity of either keeping in touch with me or rekindling some contact, but for the most part I shun my facebook messages, my ‘wall’, and all other forms of communication which Facebook.com offers. People may feel free to either IM or email me since the information is freely posted, but generally this means of communication appears to be too direct for a number of people who are not sure that they will be welcome in my life (even as remote as an occasional electronic contact may offer) or too taxing for those who do not feel like putting much effort into contacting me once they have stumbled across my page. If people did regularly contact me after they were added or rejected from my contact list, I cannot say that I would reciprocate much of the effort the majority of the time.
Further, I generally shun blogging as an act of expression. A few of you readers may be able to appreciate the irony which is offered there: I reject personal blogs for specific and real reasons, yet here I am posting my reflections. First, I was invited to post in this blog. Further, I was offered the experience which can be gained through an internship. Finally, this blog, because of the means by which I was contacted and by virtue of the subject matter, is generally professiona in content while purposefully informal in appearance. Therefore, let it be sufficient that I promise I do not blog apart from this internship, or if you are very stubborn about refusing the irony of my position then feel free to check my Facebook.com account and see the extent of my personal interaction.
I do not express myself by means of blogging for several reasons. First, the internet (along with most methods of electronic communication) offers both an abstract and an actual distance between the speaker and the audience. I disapprove of distance between the factors of a conversation because it allows for several qualities to appear which would not take place in typical conversation. Such qualities include but are not limited to rashness, insincerity, and several other vices which would generally be reprimanded through the course of a polite conversation. Second, the internet allows a conversation to take on the qualities of a published document without allowing the author to appreciate the hermeneutics (the study of how one understands the message) of what exactly he is creating. Business ethics 101 clearly states that one person should not put anything in an email which could be viewed as derogatory, personal, or otherwhise may not be strictly business related; for all business related things, discuss them without using email if at all possible. This is because the maxim which my father preached to me as a child is generally not appreciated in the supposedly informal medium which the internet promises yet fails to offer: “Do not put anything in writing which you would not want published” (or, Steven Rotherberg similarly stated in his post concerning blogging, “You should assume that anything that you post on-line is going to be read by your old-fashioned grandmother”).
In contrast to this advice, the internet is generally (via hermeneutics) recognized as an informal gathering place in which people can publicly and proudly practice their anarchy and ignore the culture which they constantly obey during their working hours. As professionals, young people are generally aware of how people ought to act in a corporate environment, and they are further aware that these rules are different from the rules which they use in order to conduct business as usual with their friends or family. Websites which allow blogging are spaces who would seem wholly separate from the work place, and this separation between work and home encourages honesty or boldness which is not acceptable in the workplace. However, recent events and news articles reveal that the suggested separation is, in fact, fictitious.
The internet, at its most basic compenents, is a collection of data which has been pooled together in order to aid in efficient research. The purpose of a Human Resources department is to research candidates in order to gather a substantial amount of information which will be used in order to properly assess qualified candidates for any particular position. A simple sylogism therefore follows: HR departments will find information about you on the internet. If you want to know what they have immediate and free access to, type your name into any search bar (the more powerful and popular search engines will most likely be utilized by HR people). Any individual in charge of the hiring process is allowed to discriminate between candidates based on any criteria which is not strictly prohibited by law. Smoking, sexual preference, weight, and hair color are all fair game, so far as I understand it.
Why, then, offer such unnecessary and most likely volatile information over an easily accessible median? If you want to flaunt your life, your whirlwind of emotions, your particular subjective understanding of the human consciousness, or any other personal fact to the public then power to you, and my hat is off to you. One should not be afraid of offering an honest depiction of oneself to society. I, however, will let society come to know me by my day to day actions, and I will not offer my thoughts into the broad electronic medium which the internet offers simply so that they may be misunderstood by people who have yet to have personal contact with me. Therefore, I will not blog. Let those who know me know me, and let those who do not find me when they are able.