Dum Pendebat Filius

Kevin Drum has responded to the Chronicle article “Bloggers Need Not Apply,” which I discussed a couple of days ago. He concurs with the point I made, that, while it’s disconcerting to imagine academics losing out on job opportunities because of their weblogs, it’s really something to think about for non-academics. Here are some excerpts from his post:

However, perhaps because I’m neither a graduate student nor an aspiring member of the academy, what struck me was that Tribble’s piece is actually more a cautionary tale for the rest of us than it is for prospective university professors. After all, universities at least claim to value creativity, free speech, and academic freedom — even if Tribble’s essay confirms that they do this more in the breach than in the observance. But what about the rest of us?

A garden variety commercial enterprise doesn’t even pretend to value these things, and if you think HR departments don’t google prospective applicants, I suspect you’re sorely mistaken. As a result, if you write a blog under your own name it might well spell trouble on a whole variety of levels… Some of this discrimination might be legal and some might not, but it hardly matters. You’ll never know it happened.

You may not be looking for a job now, but you probably will be someday and you might not be helped by having a widely known and easily googled public persona. And keep in mind that the Google cache is forever. Even deleting a blog doesn’t necessarily erase every trace of it.

One commenter put it like this:

By the time blogs were invented I already had a data trail on the Internet so gigantic that there’s nothing I could do to save myself from it. Somehow I got employed.

Then again, there are things I don’t do in public. I don’t talk about work, I try not to get into the worst flamewars, and I’m a little reticent about my personal life compared to the average LiveJournaller. But if someone in my future doesn’t want to hire Democrats, atheists, Wikipedians or washed-up physics grad students, well, I guess it’s my tough luck.