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Privacy, page 2
by patrick emanuel

Freese is not the only university professor whose job security is tied to a personal blog. After being denied tenure in October 2005, Daniel Drezner, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, was left wondering what role, if any, his blog had in the surprising decision. Ironically, Drezner seemed to predict his own fate when he wrote in his blog’s inaugural entry, “I shouldn’t be doing this. I’ll be going up for tenure soon.”

Unlike Drezner, Freese did earn tenure. Still, Freese expresses frustrations about the lack of guidelines when it comes to his personal blogging and his professional career.

“If a senior colleague at Wisconsin expressed disapproval about my blog, I would have stopped it then and there,” he says. “It's ultimately not important enough to me for me to have kept doing it and feeling like I was actually risking my job.”

Yet both Drezner and Haobsh, who lost their jobs, did not have the luxury of hindsight. 

“Some individuals are now taking measures to avoid consequences in their professional lives when they publicly air their workplace disputes in blogs,” says Robert Glenn Howard, a UW-Madison assistant professor of communication arts. And in these situations, employers have the innate advantage of implementing employment decisions, often without precedent.

Although companies like the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel do not have blogging policies, employers can and do read their employees’ blogs. Without explicit policies, employees may unknowingly cross the invisible boundary between professional and private spheres.

Employers’ main goal is to protect themselves against defamatory speech and privacy invasions. However, many bloggers contend their intentions are not malicious and should not be perceived as a threat.  “I love my job and adore my colleagues,” Freese says. “But, even if I didn't, I wouldn't be voicing those opinions on my weblog.” Nadine Haobsh’s publicist Jessie Fuller says the content on Jolie in NYC was in no way meant to vilify the magazine or her employers. This overlap of employee’s thoughts and employers’ confidentiality creates an expansive gray area where rights and privacy issues can collide.

Some bloggers and employees refuse to be strong-armed into self-regulating their blogs in fear of termination. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a civil liberties organization, defends bloggers’ rights. According to the EFF website, “Freedom of speech is the foundation of a functioning democracy, and Internet bullies shouldn't use the law to stifle legitimate free expression.”

According to the EFF, some states provide legal protection for activity outside the workplace and prohibit employers from terminating for doing so. Madison is one of the only cities in the nation to prohibit discrimination based on political or expressive activity, giving bloggers legal mandate to express views relating to both their personal and professional lives with the same conviction. Today, if asked by his employer to abandon his blog, Freese would resist. “I think merely their expressing disapproval would not be enough,” he says. “They would either have to press the issue or give me a good reason.”

Howard predicts that as more collaborative forms of blogging gain popularity, the boundaries between institutional authority and individual claims in public communication will begin to blur. Better communication between employees and employers could better define this gray area. With a vast majority of bloggers under 20 years old, Howard predicts its effects will change the future of everyday communication. But today, bloggers like Haobsh, Drezner and Freese are caught between freedom of speech and professional responsibility.

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curb magazine 2005: balance for wisconsin's young professionals