Inspired Muck

• Posted: Sep 28th 2004, 23:44

Just searching through my blogroll and I saw, on Tantek’s blog, an article about semi-permeable blogging. This was spurred on by concerns that people can use our publicly available thoughts to form prejudicial opinions on our habits and desires.

I’m quite interested by this issue. Should we be concerned by the release of our inhibitions online? I, personally, don’t reveal anything too intimate. This is a personal act however. No doubt some people use anonymity to protect themselves. Others do nothing at all. This reminds me of a high school student somewhere in the USA who posted desires to kill his parents and teachers. He was discovered and had to go and see a psychiatrist. Two points really:

• Don’t be surprised that you are seeing a psychiatrist. If she’d have read your (paper) diary she probably would have been concerned still,
• don’t get caught saying stuff like that, you don’t know who’s reading you.

Beyond this there are no real measures to protecting your thoughts other than using the online services of LiveJournal or one of the other community blog systems.