Some Lessons Bear Repeating

I generally consider myself to be a fairly web savy sort of guy.  I’ve been blogging for awhile now and generally speaking have managed to keep myself out of trouble.  Recently I wrote a post on my twitter feed that I thought was funny in the moment, but upon reflection (and a phone call from my buddy) I realized that it really wasn’t and had the potential to offend some good people (at best) or cost me my job (at worst).  So I deleted the tweet and prayed that would be the end of it.  For the most part it has been, but imagine my dismay when I found that same tweet somewhere else on the Internet.  For me it just served to reinforce the knowledge that nothing is ever truly deleted where the Internet is concerned.

This is a lesson I thought I had learned at a previous job a couple of years ago.  Things at work were going poorly for me, and I took my frustration to my blog for some old fashioned venting.  Not terribly long after that I got a warning from one of my coworkers that perhaps I should be more discreet in my blogging before someone important read it and decided I wasn’t worth having around.  I eventually got shitcanned from that job anyway (for reasons I don’t wish to go into here), but that lesson sort of stuck with me so I try to limit any blog posts about work to the extremely generic and am very careful about my choice of words.

While not terribly common,  it is a sad fact that people have been fired from their jobs over something they posted on the Internet.  It really doesn’t matter if it was on a blog, Facebook, Twitter, or any other of a number of social media web sites.  The lesson here is to always think about what you’re posting before you post it because you never know for sure who is accessing it.  In my early blogging days I was fairly naive enough to believe that no one outside of my immediate family and friends actually gave a shit about my little blog.  I now know that I have a larger following than I gave myself credit for.  Granted, I’m not exactly going to be missed by the world at large if I suddenly stop blogging (fat chance of that), but there are more people who read this than I give myself credit for. The bottom line is that I can’t ever really know who actually reads this, and because of that I need to show a little restraint and some tact in what I choose to say here. 

I used to get very upset by this because I believe so firmly in the right to free speech, but this isn’t about first amendment rights.  This is about being respectful of others and making sure I don’t say something I’m going to regret later.  From that perspective it isn’t really all that different from my day to day interactions with people.  I don’t come to work and simply spout off whatever comes to mind just because I can.  I take time and consider who I’m talking to and whether or not they need to hear what it is I have to say or if it would be better to simply keep quiet.

Why should the Internet be any different?