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The flip side of blogging

The Internet is a vast unregulated space but that doesn’t mean no one’s looking

Last week, an interesting survey popped up about bloggers in the U.K. It claimed about a third of them risked losing their job for posting derogatory and damaging details about their workplace and fellow employees including bosses. The survey conclud ed bloggers “must realise the potential impact of all postings.”

And the situation was compared to the time in the early 1990s when email, which was just becoming popular, was abused.

Then there was this incident in which a university in the U.K. threatened its own students with legal action when comments made about staff on popular social networking sites Myspace and Facebook were found to be unacceptable. The university is now thinking about establishing new rules for using websites on campus and said students must use “legitimate” means to express dissent.

Blogging is equally big in India and there have been quite a few run-ins with bloggers in the recent past. Not so long ago, the government tried to block popular blog sites.

The reasons for the ban were never clearly spelt out but when the sites they intended to block were known, it was plain what the aim was. The government eventually had to back down before the matter went to the courts. Another famous incident was the employee of a multi-national company who had to “quit” his job after he posted a link to a damaging report on a B-school on his blog.

The media hasn’t been immune. Warfornews (warfornews.blogspot.com) became one of the most read blogs in media circles for digging into what happens behind the news. Such was its impact that some of the country’s top journalists took time out to systematically hunt down the bloggers.

The bloggers finally had to move out of their workplaces and now all you get online is “No posts match your query.”

True, the Internet is most unregulated space you can find, but it isn’t exactly free. It is clear that governments today have the capability to sift through Internet communication however large the volume may be.

Filtering websites and email is routine but it often extends to blogging and Internet telephony. There has been a lot of debate about freedom of speech and blogs, but it is increasingly becoming clear that there are legal implications. Not just governments, even companies can exercise control to preserve their “reputation and competitive advantage”.

The Chinese have always had a march on keeping tabs on how its citizens use the net. The latest attempt was to get bloggers to register their real names. It was thought it would make the bloggers “more responsible for their behaviour”. But the proposal maintains the registration is voluntary.

ANAND SANKAR

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