Chalk one up for malice

Darrell restricted access to his social networking profiles and blog archive in preparation for law school.

I thought this was excessive at the time, but I found myself doing the same thing today.

I never thought I would have to:

• I’ve never smoked a cigarette and waited until I was 21 to drink.
• I’ve never been drunk, so no stereotypical drunk college student pics exist of me.
• I glossed over RA-related situations like those duty nights busting off-the-chain parties of belligerent freshmen. Those are typically be described as “challenging” or “tiresome” if they are mentioned at all.
• I also kept the ample staff and school related drama out of the blog.

You’d think this would keep me out of e-trouble right?

Wrong!

But it wasn’t the blog that got me into trouble: It was twitter.

I use a twitter program called Twirl. It looks like a little instant message box on my desktop.

The short of it: twitter/twirl updates my facebook status among other things. I ticked someone off and they dug through my facebook status archive to fish for some dirt, printed it out, and gave it to my supervisor.

Who does this?

The tweets were taken out of context and I didn’t name individuals (nor say anything crazy), so I didn’t get into trouble. It was still horribly awkward explaining less-than-rosy tweets to a supervisor. I was asked to trash the tweets.

A friend experienced an extreme version of the online-work problem last semester: He had to meet with a departmental head because a professor went through his myspace account and printed out a comment someone made on my friend’s profile.

A comment.

Heck, It wasn’t even his comment!

Yes the comment was stupid, but it wasn’t profane, hateful, or related to school or work. But my friend had to edit his profile and take the comment down.

Who has time to police myspace comments? I don’t. My myspace, which had absolutely nothing remotely controversial on it, is now private.

What about facebook, which started this mess? My facebook account is now private even to students at my school. I also unfriended over 400 people (I had around 650 friends at UMiami before and now I have less than 200.)

My blog? Well, chalk one up for the malicious ones, because I’m not willing to get dooced for free speech.

I then went through my main blog and thought about how a malicious person could spin entries. I found myself deleting and censoring a lot of completely innocent things and hated doing it.

I enjoy publishing and think that online transparency is important. It grilled my cheese to censor things that are obviously less controversial than a donut commercial just because some nameless malicious person could spin them.

Self-publication (via wordpress/twitter/myspace, etc.) helps me stay in contact with friends and can also be helpful to others. I’ve found several blogs (Divine Angst, Boy in Suit, Fight the Hypo, among others) very informative as a 0L, and hope that this blog can be a resource to another 0L in the future. I just hope I don’t end up editing the life out of everything I post now…

And about those pesky twitter updates? They are still public, but the “funny” ones are deleted. I shant twitter anything I wouldn’t chat with Mr. Ratzinger about…well, okay, that’s a uh, high standard, but eh, how about not twittering anything I wouldn’t mind discussing on The Factor ?