\n| \n Despite his generally cavalier attitude towards such
\n journalistic conventions as imagined objectivity and exhaustive fact-checking,
\n increasing
\n exposure
\n and a growing readership has made the Dowbrigade aware the mere fact
\n of publishing in a public place carries with it certain inescapable risks
\n and responsibilities. <\/p>\n On a number of occasions readers have written in with sidelights to
\n stories of which we were previously unaware. In addition, the Law of
\n Unintended Consequences dictates that words written with ironic, humorous
\n or even loving intent can cause incredible hurt, damage lives, and even
\n kill people. Just because the consequences are unintended does not abjure
\n the author of responsibility, as they can often be anticipated and avoided.<\/p>\n Two stories related to blogging in this morning’s Boston Globe illustrate
\n some of the horrific possibilities inherent in the Law of Unintended Consequences,
\n a corollary of the ubiquitous Murphy’s Law. The first concerns a blogger
\n at Microsoft who was fired after blogging a photo of maintenance workers
\n unloading a shipment of Macintosh computers at Microsoft headquarters. <\/p>\n The focus of the article is the danger of blogging about your job, workplace
\n or co-workers. This is a danger the Dowbrigade is familiar with, as our
\n postings concerning the recent Presidential Search Snafu at Boston University
\n were somewhat critical, to say the least. But we are personally less
\n concerned with our current employer reading our blog than with its influence
\n on our future employment prospects.<\/p>\n In this day and age, the first thing any competent personnel manager will
\n do with a potential employees resume is to Google the individual involved. Thanks
\n to the qualified success of the Dowbrigade News and Google’s blog-friendly
\n logarithm, four of the top ten search results for our name lead directly
\n to our Blog. Thanks to the unparalleled efficiency of the Blog format
\n as an on-line information storage and access system, this means virtually
\n everything we have written since founding our Blog (can it only have been
\n six months ago?) is there for a prospective employers leisurely perusal.<\/p>\n In our case this is a more than theoretical concern as the Dowbrigade
\n is in the initial phases of a job hunt himself. Whether the Dowbrigade
\n News will be a help or a hindrance in that search remains to be seen.<\/p>\n The second article is even scarier. The Globe, in an article called
\n "Rumors of Rape" tells the story a California sex therapist who wrote and
\n posted an article called "The Rape of Iraq". Obviously a metaphor. But
\n whole sectors of the Muslim press picked up the story and presented it as
\n holding that a prestigeous American academic had revealed that a massive wave of rapes had begun with the American invasion
\n and was ongoing.<\/p>\n In the most alarming manifestation of possible deadly Unintended Consequences,
\n Turkish suicide bomber Ilyas Kuncak was reportedly driven to kill himself
\n and 12 other innocents as revenge for these rapes which never took place.<\/p>\n It’s an increasingly and deceptively dangerous world in which we blog,
\n my friends.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Despite his generally cavalier attitude towards such journalistic conventions as imagined objectivity and exhaustive fact-checking, increasing exposure and a growing readership has made the Dowbrigade aware the mere fact of publishing in a public place carries with it certain inescapable … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":299,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1443],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-esl-links"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/299"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1903"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1903\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} |