My Blogging Limits

My blogging limitations -- that is, the parameters I apply in order to decide what is suitable and appropriate for public writing -- are based on a few basic rules I've set for myself, and on some fuzzier guidelines I've learned through experience (both mine and others').

Different people are going to have different notions of what is and isn't okay to blog about, and I don't intend this to be a set of regulations I'm going to judge other people by, but since the subject came up recently elsewhere I figured I would add my take on things to the discussion in the form of a post.

So, here are my personal blogging guidelines, for whatever it's worth:

1.) Work

Any writing about work must be in fairly generic terms (e.g., "I am an electromagnetic engineer at an aerospace company", rather than, "I am an electromagnetic engineer in the [X] department of [company name]"), and of course I will not ever post any proprietary information about any work projects online.

Additionally I do not name any individual people I work with at any given time (it's okay to say "a manager" or "a co-worker", but not "my boss, Mary Smith" or "my co-worker, Fred Jones") or give out too many identifying details about people I work with.

This rule came about due to my happening upon a lot of news articles a few years back about people getting fired for blogging about their jobs; I figured that was something I wanted to avoid and could pretty easily avoid just by declaring a moratorium on specifics.

(I'm more liberal about writing about past jobs, but even then I usually avoid naming names unless there's already some public document associating me with a particular person at a company; e.g., there's stuff online from when I was an intern at NASA that mentions the names of my boss then and probably some co-workers, but that stuff was all posted as part of a project where everyone involved had agreed to participate.)

2.) Other People

Any writing about other people¹ must be:

(a) factually correct to the best of my knowledge and memory, and,

(b) in sufficiently generic terms so as not to permit easy identification of individuals, or

(c) based on material that is already public, or

(d) done with permission (unless about a sufficiently non-sensitive subject)

As for what counts as a "sensitive subject", I determine that based on experience and reading. E.g., at present it is my perception that most people would prefer not to have their family members or others who know them describing their flatulence levels, medication regimens, or Scooby Doo underwear online.

Furthermore I'm leery of speculating about people's motivations (without a whole lot of good evidence), or offering a tidy interpretation of a situation that is probably anything but tidy. I need a lot of evidence before I determine that someone doesn't merit the benefit of the doubt anymore.

On the other hand, I think it's fine to write about something someone has done and what the consequences of that action were (or may be in the future). This is not the same thing as questioning someone's intentions, and shouldn't be taken as a "personal attack".

3.) Self

As with writing about others, writing about self must first and foremost be factually correct to the best of my knowledge and memory. I have actually been known to do things like...root through old files (the paper kind) and photo albums, just to make sure I'm remembering what I think I am.

Secondarily, (and this is relatively new for me), I make somewhat of an effort to avoid egregious over-sharing. I was born totally unselfconscious and had to be taught repeatedly not to, say, walk around with my dress somewhere up near my head as a kid.

In junior high I got very defensive and suspicious for a while as a result of being bullied, but it was years and years after that (and I am talking "not until my 20s") that it occurred to me that I did not HAVE to tell people whatever they asked all the time, especially if I didn't know them very well. So I run a brain-algorithm now when blogging that urges me to think before I write.

I still write about plenty of things that I'm guessing some people would consider embarrassing, and I think it's important to do this in some cases as some of the things I can help shed light on are things that I don't think people ought to be stigmatized for in the first place -- but I feel like I at least have a right to privacy now, and I think that's a good thing.

---

1 - By "other people" I'm referring primarily to family members, others I've known offline growing up, and people I know online but have had a reasonable amount of private (e-mail, etc.) communication with.

I'm also referring secondarily to people I don't know at all but who I might read about in an article or book, but since the only way I'm generally going to learn anything about those people is via information that's already somehow public, the challenge there becomes less one of deciding what bears revealing, and more one of what bears repeating.