Cecilia Weckström

I had a strange experience the other day. Someone I met for the first time told me they had ‘Googled’ me before our meeting and were intrigued to find all this stuff about me, including this blog. Now forgive me folks, but on one hand here I am, with a blog being seemingly progressive and ‘out there’, in with the times and all that and the fact is that most of my friends don’t read my blog, at least not regularly anyway, because they prefer to talk to me in person about the topics I blog about and many more things, rather than read about them on my blog.

Can’t blame them really, but this has also caused a certain disconnect for me, where usually I would meet people and it would be me making the first impression and eventually this person would discover I had a blog, which would be more of a curious ‘aha’ moment for them, rather than something they would use to form an opinion about me even before meeting me. However, this, as I mentioned, was all turned on its head just the other day. The insecure person in me immediately wondered ‘what do they think… do they like what I write or do they think I’m a total nutcase??’ Anonymity on the web at least (most of the time) means you will never get to meet the people in person who think your blog is a bunch of ramblings and that you are truly nuts.. but it may all change!

Fortunately this individual was very complementary, or perhaps just a supremely a nice person who couldn’t bring themselves to tell me just how bad they thought my writing was, but fortunately at least saved me the embarrassment of telling it to my face. Of course you will all rush to tell me that I should have thought of that when starting a blog and to this I reply: I did! Initially I was very much in two minds about whether I should blog under my real name or anonymously, and initially I did blog completely anonymously as I was experimenting with content and style and so on.

Eventually I settled for the ‘a little bit about everything’ approach that you find on this blog – stuff I think about and find that writing it down into a post helps me structure my thoughts and move on and think about new stuff… clearing my mind if you like. So my blog has now become a bit of a scratch book of thoughts and sometimes pretty personal too – in the same breath I have abandoned anonymity and even sport a button to my Linked-in profile now for all those who wonder who I am and why I’m interested in all these diverse topics (hopefully my profile goes some way to explain this..here’s me hoping anyway!)

The scary thing is though that the more I have become ‘exposed’ through this blog, the more people, prospective employers, clients, you name it all use Google to check up on people they are about to make contact to. On one hand we are seeing extremely personal confessions on blogs and various social networking sites and on the other hand we are seeing more and more people having to pay the price for that as it seems that there are still employers out there who are looking for people who are literally the ‘blank’ canvasses – with no clearly defined and perhaps ‘jarring’ personal identities to try to mold into an organisation where individualism is a fault, not an asset.

Some are talking about how young people in particular should be much more careful about what they do reveal on-line as that digital trail will follow them forever – there are even companies devoted to destroying information about you on the net these days – service comes at a pretty price though. The one place not even they can reach are the news archives of various papers – once you end up there you are on the net forever. So where does that leave us? It seems that the arena is wide open for the debate on a set of ‘net ethics’ of sorts – what is acceptable to take into account about a person in terms of background checks on the net, versus what is advisable for individuals to reveal on-line?

Ultimately some things are personal and although revealed on-line on say a social networking site, they should remain as such or be considered as such by a company seeking to employ that person. Also those who devote countless hours to blogging and so on are in fact industrious minds to whom a blog is one outlet, but give the person a challenge to chew on that same industrious mind can be put to service for the benefit of a company, as opposed to being seen as an overtly extrovert destroyer of ‘the way we have always done things in this company’. What do you think?