Discretion

Part of this course, in addition to writing our own blogs, involves reading other students blogs. The goal is that we will be able to share further ideas in an online forum setting. While I wish I could say that I regularly read everyone’s blog, I admit that, due to the heavy time constraints on an engineer’s schedule. Thus, when I saw that the prompt this week was to write about other student’s blogs, I was a little nervous, as I generally read the blogs in a fairly passive manner. That is, I don’t usually get terribly caught up and opinionated about the point that the student is making.

That being said, however, the blog by Tiffany last week caught my eye. The topic that the class was to consider that week was the question of how putting our writing online affects our writing. Most of us touched on the fact that putting our blogs online gives us a potentially much larger reading audience then just our professor. I discussed how, even if it is likely that people outside of our classes are not reading our blogs, it at least exposes us to some peer review when our classmates read our blogs.

What I didn’t discuss, and what I feel that Tiffany nicely covered was the global effects of posting things online. We live in a very connected society, with programs like Facebook and Twitter allowing us to communicate instantly with people all over the world. In that sense, then, putting something online is fundamentally different, because now a huge number of people can see it. Those, “other people” can include future employers, and we have all heard of stories of people who didn’t get a job because of something they had posted online about themselves.

In a word, posting anything online requires much more discretion and judgment. I appreciated Tiffany’s viewpoint on her Facebook post concerning her argument with her mom. It can be very easy to write something, and then post it, without considering who exactly will be reading it. I have more than once posted a comment or reply to someone, then an instant later realized how ridiculous it was, or how it could be misconstrued. Fortunately, in many cases it is possible to remove the comment, but, on a different side of things, all of us can probably remember sending an e-mail, which, immediately after we sent it, we wished we wouldn’t have. While I am probably doing a poor job of explaining it, my point is that today’s technology allows us to easily post things which can then be nearly instantly read by many, many people. Therefore, we must be absolutely certain that whatever we did or said is a good reflection of ourselves.

I will close by giving a quick example of how I feel I made the exact error I just discuss on this class blog. A few weeks ago we had to write about the topic of alignment, giving specific examples, if possible. I couldn’t think of any “really good” examples, but did have one situation come to mind, which involved another group that I am a part of. Thinking that “only our class is going to read this blog” I wrote about the story. However, I later found out that other people, in fact people from the group that the blog was about, were indeed reading my blog. Now the situation that I explained in the blog offensive or even negative, but I did feel badly about having used it, given my audience. I ended up removing the post, not because it was particularly problematic, but because I do want to be very careful about what I say online.

So, technology is a wonderful tool for communication, but it must be used with discretion. Programs like Facebook are nice because they allow us to stay connected with people. Our blogs are useful because they allow our classmates to read our writing. However, we must remember, that our post on Facebook can be seen by everybody, not just the friend it was intended for. And anyone can read our blogs, so we need to be careful what we write about.