« John Cleese, the LiveVault Video & Blog | Main | Business Blog Summit San Francisco August 18th-19th 2005 »
July 31, 2005Blogher Conference Covers Fear of Blogging
Jay Rosen wrote up his notes on the Blogher conference, I was particularly interested to read his coverage of fear and terror in blogging.
“At the session on flaming and anger online, at the Blogging 101 workshop, at the discussion about identity blogging, and here and there in almost every other session I heard women talking about the personal attacks they had either expected or received. They discussed stalking and whether blogging led to it. They talked about losing their jobs if they said the wrong thing on their blog. They spoke about their children and whether kids were put in danger when mom blogs. They asked about publishing your address and what could happen if you did. They spoke about their dread when an anonymous blog was traced to them. They said they were filled with anxiety that someone they knew was going to read their blog.
It seemed to me (and I told the conference this part) that these were reflections on a kind of terror that is by now deeply associated with the Internet, especially the strangers who are on it. At a conference of bloggers that was 80 percent men and 20 percent women (the usual ratio) this would barely get expressed. I don’t recall many expressions of dread from bloggers at the three BloggersCons I attended.
Here it was routine, which is not to say bloghercon was dominated by expressions of terror (because it wasn’t) but rather in a conference that is 80 percent women—and where 100 percent of the tone was set by women—there were no disincentives to speaking about raw fears connected intimately to the act blogging.�
At conferences and sessions with people on blogging, most people are expressing concerns about the legal implications of blogging. As I tend to write about more business related issues and avoid covering my personal life too much I have not had very many of the same concerns. I’d like to catalog other concerns people have about blogging, either starting to blog, commenting on blogs or the consequences of colleagues’ blogging.
Posted by johncass at July 31, 2005 12:21 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://tmpmt.backbonemedia.com/mt2/mt-tb.cgi/80
