Archive for the ‘Group Think’ Category

Are our personal blogs tickling the feet of Big Brother or generally just backfiring on us?  It’s becoming an interesting problem, as I noticed this phenomenon take place recently.

I was eating dinner out the other night & letting my ears roam free over any conversations that might play as my dinner companion.  I heard the usual chit chat & then happened upon a fascinating dialogue between two work colleagues.  They were discussing an individual they had almost hired until they looked at, through the help of a friend, their MySpace page & found that the person was quite the partier.

So that brings up a few topics, right?  One- should potential employers look at potential employee’s personal blogs/MySpace pages?  Two- should you allow yourself to omit items on your personal pages just so you don’t have to worry about a fretting Big Brother?  Tell me what you think, as it’s becoming quite the issue.

I don’t know if you’re following the story or not, but Ashland City’s Cheatham County is dealing with this same issue.  The newest school board member, 26-year-old Kurt Scott, wrote a post three years ago about using marijuana.  As you can imagine, parents were calling in to see if this appointment was really in the best interest of the school board.

Kurt wrote, back in 2005, “Life of someone like me, who likes to smoke weed, can sometimes br (sic) dreary,” a post that he is calling a “poor attempt at poetry”, and taken almost entirely from another source.   Which rather makes sense, seeing as how in the same MySpace post he penned, “Today is a good day, I didn’t even have to use my AK.”  So, unless we all think that this Kurt dude is walking the streets of Ashland City, toting an AK-47 with your name on it, we can all agree this post should not be taken seriously.

But should we even be dissecting this young man’s personal Web posts?  I mean, in this oh so modern world we’re developing, where has all the privacy gone?  Or maybe that’s just it, if you’re putting yourself out there, you deserve what you get?  That sounds more like the old celebrity response, if they didn’t want their picture taken all the time, they shouldn’t have been actors.  Or the good ole rape line, if she didn’t want trouble, she shouldn’t have worn such a short skirt…

Tell me what you think.