Behind The Mask
Another thing that might put people off
blogging is that there's very little opportunity for anonymity online any more.
Many of the most popular blogs of the last decade were written under
pseudonyms; a false name gave bloggers the freedom to write what they really
thought, without worrying about repercussions from their friends, family, or
employer.
Over the years, though, all of those
anonymous bloggers were unmasked. Belle de Jour turned out to be Dr Brooke
Magnanti; Girl With A One-Track Mind was revealed to be assistant film director
Zoe Margolis; and NightJack turned out to be DC Richard Horton. There have been
others too, notably Gay Girl in Damascus, who turned out to be Tom MacMaster, a
married man from Scotland, though his case is a little different from the
others, because he wasn't using a pseudonym to protect his privacy while
writing honestly; he was pretending to be a completely different person.
These unmaskings may have led to some
career opportunities for the people behind the blogs, but they've also led to
jobs being lost and relationships damaged and, in almost every case, the
blogger stopped writing after his or her identity was revealed. That not only
knocked several prominent bloggers out of the blogosphere, but also undoubtedly
put other people off writing blogs because their privacy could never really be
guaranteed. The promise of being able to speak your mind online without being
identified for it or having to deal with the consequences of saying certain
things online in your real life turned out to be an illusion.
Going Mainstream
Another thing that's affected personal
blogging is the change in the way blogging is perceived - and the way it's
become more of a corporate game. I mentioned earlier that the most popular
blogs are now all Huffington Post style news sites; they're not really blogs,
in the original sense. There's been a kind of blurring of the line between
supposedly traditional media online, and 'blogs'; sites like Jezebel and
Lifehacker might be referred to as blogs, but really there's very little
difference between them and, say, the Guardian's online site. The only
difference, really, is that these sites tend not to publish hard news; they're
more about editorials and opinions, and the writers don't refer to themselves
as journalists.
Most of us probably get the vast majority
of our news and entertainment online nowadays, and dozens of successful new
media outlets have sprung up. Sometimes, bloggers are recruited to write for
these sites, since they've already demonstrated a talent for writing for the
web and attracting page views, but this often means that the writers' own blogs
go quiet. Actually, by comparison, personal blogs are pretty quiet anyway. Even
bloggers who commit themselves to regular schedules tend to post, at most, once
a day; if you're one person writing about yourself, how much more is there to
say, really? As a result, some of the web traffic may have moved on to busier
sites, and bloggers who feel ignored stop blogging.
Be Careful What You Say Online
You'll have heard about the cases of Paul
Chambers, who got arrested for jokingly tweeting about blowing up an airport,
and Liam Stacey, who was arrested for racist remarks on Twitter, but you
might not have heard about Crystal L Cox, who was sued for defamation over a
blog post that called attorney Kevin Padrick a "thief",
"liar" and "thug."
A judge in Oregon awarded $2.5 million to
Padrick in compensation, making a particular note that since Cox was a blogger
and not a journalist, she couldn't claim the same legal protection as a
journalist would. The case has since been complicated since it turns out Cox
offered to remove her posts for a fee, so allegations of extortion are
bouncing back and forth, but it's interesting nonetheless that the law was
considered to be different for different types of online writers.
Other bloggers have been sued over the
years for all kinds of things, including writing bad reviews of restaurants
or revealing the end of a TV show before it aired, so if you're a blogger,
it's maybe worth bearing in mind that writing certain things can have serious
consequences.
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