The inspiration for my blog comes from many of the people I know in real life – there is always the danger that they may (a) find my blog; (b) recognise certain events or people described and (c) they may get very cross! But writers need copy and copy comes often from daily life experience.

(Female respondent, 2007)

Secret from friends and family

We have already seen when discussing blogs-as-diaries that some blog providers such as LiveJournal offer bloggers the opportunity to limit access to both their actual posts and the commenting facility. Thus LiveJournal bloggers can choose to open access to their blogs only to select family and friends. As a female respondent to the 2007 survey explained: ‘My personal blog is friends-locked on LiveJournal to stop prospective employers etc. reading more personal entries’. Thus one way to deal with the privacy issue is for bloggers to restrict their readership. Such an approach will only work, however, when the main motivation for keeping a blog is to keep in contact with real-life friends and family or to use the blog as a personal and private diary. Restricting access would not be of use to a blogger who is motivated to blog in order to make new connections online or who wishes to reach an unknown audience with information or opinion.

In direct contrast to those who choose LiveJournal because it helps them restrict their readership to offline friends and family, other bloggers are trying hard to keep their blog secret from their closest associates – and such reticence is often because the blogger wants to write about their family and friends, and not necessarily in a complimentary way. The quote at the beginning of this section comes from an early post in a blog started in 2002 by a British mother in her thirties. She made it clear at the start of her blog that she was writing for her own purposes and saw her blog as a combination of a diary and a therapeutic tool rather than for a readership. Despite these motivations, however, she did not attempt to limit her readership in any way, relying on the fact that the blogosphere is a big place to keep her anonymous. In fact, she remarked that, luckily, her husband was ‘not technically minded and will probably never find this site, so I can write what I like about him’. Her posts were for herself, not for others, and in fact she was very aware of how some of these posts might hurt or upset her friends and family if they ever read them. Another blogger’s need for anonymity resulted in an intermittent style to her postings since she had to close down her blog whenever someone else entered the room. Her posts sometimes included warnings that she would not be able to write for a while because members of the family would be around. It is reminiscent of the apocryphal stories of Jane Austen writing away on her little pieces of paper and hiding them whenever someone else enter the room. Chandler (1998) mentions the lack of hard copy as a reassuring aspect of personal homepages and, in practice, a physical diary may be harder to hide than the existence of an electronic one. Interestingly, the motivations of the blogger of By a Woman started to change very early on in her blogging and she quickly grew to appreciate her online readership – recording her excitement when she received an e-mail from a reader only a few days after she started blogging: ‘can’t believe people may actually be reading my drivel’. Two years after starting the blog she recorded her 10,000th visitor and noted ‘I’m sure that although I didn’t start this with actual real-life readers in mind I would have given up long ago without you guys to keep me company’. Thus although she had started her blog as a private diary, this blogger quickly found that she soon became enraptured by the feedback she received – but it was feedback from strangers that she particularly sought, not from people who knew her in real life.

Reed (2005) also found that his London bloggers were eager to attract strangers to their blog, but not as happy to find friends reading it. Sometimes this development led to self-censorship and the blog lost its original purpose. As a female respondent to our 2006 survey explained:

Another woman respondent reported changing her blogging behaviour as a result of finding out that her ex-husband read her blog:

Her ex-husband had attempted to use her blog posts as evidence against her in a custody battle over their children. However, she reported that, against his expectations, the excerpts from her blog used as evidence in court actually worked in her favour and she was granted custody.

Thus finding that a specific person is reading their blog might cause a blogger to change the way they post or even in extreme cases to stop blogging entirely. The blog of a student in Bloomington, Indiana, reported how she was ‘weirded out’ to be informed by her boyfriend that his mother now read her blog. She worried about how the mother had reacted to the intimate descriptions of the two young students’ love-making and decided that more censorship was now needed. A blogger in Belgium reported on the shock she received when an acquaintance in her office commented ‘I loved the write-up of me and my wife’s a great fan of yours’. She had no recollection of mentioning him in her blog at all and reflected bitterly that ‘Belgium is too small’. Her boyfriend suggested that on his next visit to London he should approach random strangers and offer praise of their blog in order to completely panic them. However, this blogger, who writes a blog entitled My Boyfriend is a Twat, clearly got over any feelings of embarrassment or worries about her privacy since in 2007 her blog was published in book form by The Friday Project under her real-life name – Zoe McCarthy, thus outing her to all and sundry. (The phenomenon of blogs being turned into so-called ‘blooks’ is discussed in more detail in a later section.)

Some bloggers address the privacy problem by writing more than one blog. Around half of the respondents to the surveys (27 out of 48 responses to this question in 2006 and 47 out of 104 in 2007) admitted that they had more than one on-going blog, with different blogs having different purposes and sometimes different readerships. Similarly, Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2009 found that the average respondent had three or more blogs. For example, one female respondent had a blog under her real name and another under a pseudonym where she felt that she could whine and moan about her life more. Other bloggers’ motivations for multiple blogs might be related to the subject matter. A male respondent stated: ‘I have a LiveJournal which is Friends Only for very personal posts and my [other blog URL] for stuff anyone in the world can read.’ One female American blogger explained:

Wood (2008) agrees that anonymity on the Internet can be particularly helpful in the context of blogs about sex and suggests that women can be freed by such anonymity to have discussions including intimate details about their sex lives or their own bodies, which they would not be able to undertake with friends in real life. However, blogging about such personal subjects can often only be done if the blogger is convinced that his or her anonymity is secured. One female respondent in 2006 told us:

Secret from employers

As we can see from the story about the nurse, concerns about privacy can also be related to employment. There are basically two issues associated with blogging and work. One is the wider issue of the use of an employer’s facilities for non-work-related Internet use. A 2005 survey for an American body, the Society for Human Resource Management, found that 20 per cent of its members had fired employees on these grounds (Hopkins, 2005). The other issue is content. There have been quite a few high-profile cases in recent years concerning bloggers being dismissed for blogging at or about their employment. For example, in January 2005 a Waterstone’s employee was dismissed by the book chain for blogging about his employment at their store in Edinburgh. In the United States an airline attendant who called herself Queen of the Sky was dismissed by Delta Air Lines for ‘inappropriate images’ on her blog that showed her in her airline uniform. Again, this woman, Ellen Simonetti, has gone on to publish a book about her experiences and to attempt to forge a career as a media commentator. There is even a word for such dismissals – according to UrbanDictionary.com, to be ‘dooced’ is to lose your job for something you wrote on your blog. Heather B. Armstrong, who writes a blog called dooce.com, was one of the first bloggers in the United States to be sacked from her job for making derogatory remarks about her fellow workers in her blog. One British survey respondent, who uses the blog name The English Courtesan and uses her blog to advertise her rates and specialities as a call-girl, stated: ‘The rise of “doocing” is a real concern for courtesans and anyone else who writes about their sexual exploits – La Petite Anglaise and Abby Lee (Girl With A One Track Mind) were just two recent media exposes.’ More recently, the sex-blogger and author Belle de Jour, whose blog, Diary of a London Call Girl, was successfully published as a book and later made into a television series, outed herself in November 2009 as Dr Brooke Magnanti of the Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health. Magnanti stated that she was revealing her identity on her own terms before an ex-boyfriend could do it for her. Like Magnanti, Armstrong and the other two bloggers mentioned by this respondent are now published authors, suggesting that once one’s anonymity has been lost, it may be possible to capitalise upon any concomitant infamy by forging a new career in the media, if only for a limited amount of time.

Also in 2009 the anonymous author of the blog NightJack, who had been awarded the Orwell Prize for political writing in April of that year, was outed by a journalist from The Times as Detective Constable Richard Horton of the Lancashire Constabulary (Gibb, 2009). Despite Horton seeking a legal injunction to stop the newspaper revealing his name, Mr Justice Eady ruled that the blogger could have no reasonable expectation of anonymity because ‘blogging is essentially a public rather than a private activity’. This was a landmark decision that may well have an impact on many other bloggers who rely on keeping their anonymity while writing about their work, friends, family or other aspects of their lives and their opinions, and specifically places blogging in the public rather than the private sphere. The NightJack blog offered its readers an insight into frontline policing, but also included Horton’s strong views on social and political issues. Some of the most popular sections included anecdotes about cases on which the detective constable had worked. Although Horton changed details such as the names of people and places, once his identity was known it became possible for the actual cases to be identified. Horton was issued with a written warning by his superiors and his blog was deleted.

Guadagno et al. (2008) suggest a notion of ‘relative anonymity’ with reference to the way in which bloggers may reveal more information on their blogs than they realize. They suggest that people who communicate online experience a reduced awareness of the other individuals who might be reading their words, and point out that not only have bloggers been fired because they have blogged about their jobs, but other stories in the media give examples of bloggers who have confessed online to crimes they have committed or affairs they have conducted with seemingly little awareness of who might be reading such admissions. The cases mentioned include a murder in 2007 where a 17-year-old boy stabbed to death his 15-year-old girlfriend’s mother. Both teenagers had blogged about their feelings and activities before and after the murder on their MySpace blogs, including references in the girl’s blog to ‘doing the laundry’ for her boyfriend – apparently a reference to washing his bloody clothes (Healy, 2007).

More amusingly, in February 2009 The Times newspaper investigated a ‘confession craze’ said to be sweeping the Internet whereby bloggers were encouraged to confess ‘25 random things’ about themselves. Those who had already succumbed to the urge were said to include MP Tom Harris, the former transport minister, who admitted to having stolen a roll of Sellotape from a newsagent as a child and John Prescott, the former deputy Labour leader, who admitted crying at the film Billy Elliot, which he has been to see six times (Woods, 2009). The majority of these lists were created using the ‘notes’ blogging section of the Facebook site. Commenting on the phenomenon in The Times article, professor of psychology Mark Griffiths made the point that, because it is a non-threatening and dis-inhibiting medium, the Internet encourages people to reveal things that they would never reveal in face-to-face conversation or, it must be assumed, in an interview with a journalist.

Our surveyed bloggers were definitely concerned about the impact of their blogging on present or future employment opportunities. They were also aware that future employers might search the Internet for information about them before deciding to offer them employment or even an interview, and several expressed worries about postings they had made in the early days of their blog before they became better informed about the Internet’s archiving and search facilities. Even if they subsequently deleted these posts, or even the entire blog itself, this is no guarantee that a future employer might not be able to search out damning evidence using facilities such as the Wayback Machine, which allows you to ‘surf the Web as it was’ from 1996 to the current day (http://web.archive.org/collections/web.html). As one male respondent commented in 2006: ‘the damage is done and there is now no going back’.

Many of the survey respondents were anxious to keep their private and professional lives apart and worried about employers or work colleagues reading their blog. As one male respondent put it: ‘There are certain people for whom I work who I would not really want to see my blog, simply from the point of view that it puts forward a side of me that differs slightly from my professional front’. Another stated that moving to a new job had made him limit what he wrote in his blog: ‘Since moving in to a new job my posting has almost ceased as I try to get a handle on what’s allowed or not. … It’s not so much retribution from above, but from colleagues who may not understand the nature of some of the comments I make (i.e. devil’s advocate)’. Others were very aware that their blog could get them into serious legal trouble:

This response demonstrates the way in which bloggers can be aware of, and write for, more than one audience at a time – here the blogger writes in a way that assumes that his friends will understand far more of the background or implications of his posts than casual readers would pick up.

For some respondents, their blogging had already impacted negatively on their employment. In the 2006 survey, two of the respondents reported being warned not to blog at or about work and one admitted that she had been sacked after bitching about work colleagues on her blog. A male respondent to the 2007 survey who worked as a freelance journalist even claimed harassment by the American government, stating:

It should be noted that some bloggers have no issues about being identified and, indeed, see their blog as part of their employment. A good example of this type of blogger is the religious minister who blogs as part of his or her outreach to their community. Our surveys included several ministers who used blogs as part of their ministry and indeed one major motivator for a substantial minority of our respondents could be encapsulated under the heading ‘God’, including one respondent who described himself as a member of an online evangelistic gaming ministry. Another respondent was a Methodist minister who served as a chaplain for Swansea University and therefore used blogging as a way of communicating with students. He gave a full name and contact details on his blog plus a pencil drawing of himself rather than a photograph. He commented: ‘As a minister, a large part of my job is about communication. Blogging is one way of widening the reach of what I believe to be an important message. I think that’s the main reason I do it.’

Other bloggers who revealed personal data about themselves did so because the blog linked to their job. For example, some respondents used their blog to market either themselves or their services, and thus needed to make their contact details at least available to interested readers. Others used their blog to discuss professional issues. For example, one American male respondent who worked as a lawyer focused his blog mainly on legal issues. His comments on such issues carried much more weight with readers because he clearly identified himself as a qualified lawyer with full details of his background and links to his company’s website.

Does a concern with privacy result in a limiting of the amount of information given about the blogger in his or her blog? When selecting blogs for our studies we found that we had to discard many otherwise suitable bloggers because they did not offer an e-mail address or any other way of contacting them on their blog. This was particularly true of women’s blogs. In contrast, we found that women (and gay men) were slightly more likely to put a photograph of themselves on their blog. In some cases this was done even while the blogger withheld other personal detail such as their name, suggesting that they did not mind being recognised by people who already knew them, but were wary of being identified by strangers.

There is a gender dimension to concerns about privacy. In general, women in both the United Kingdom and the United States tend to be more concerned about the negative aspects of the Internet (Media literacy audit, 2006; Fallows, 2005). In both surveys more women than men said that they had concerns about privacy, although some men also had such concerns (in 2006 16 women and 12 men admitted to having concerns about privacy out of 47 responses to this question while in 2007 25 women and 18 men were worried out of 100 responses). These concerns mostly related to being identified, whether by employers, colleagues, friends or family. Concerns ranged from the mild ‘some people at work might be a bit snarky about it if they knew I was writing it’ (Male respondent, 2006) to the more alarming ‘I’ve also had stalkers, people threaten me physically or to “out” me as my real-life persona’ (Female respondent, 2006). Gay bloggers in particular mentioned concerns about family members or co-workers discovering their blogs.

Others worried about strangers identifying them from their blogs. Nardi et al. (2004) suggest that many blogs contain sufficient information to identify individuals even if they try to remain anonymous. One female respondent reported: ‘I do worry that my home and my habits can be identified from the blog – one reader (who lives nearby) worked out the building I live in’. Another stated: ‘A recent and unhealthy case of cyberstalking merely reinforced to me how important it is to keep anonymity online.’ Two male respondents told us about being recognised by readers from photographs on their blog – one in his home town and one in the lounge of an international airport. It should be noted that while the two female respondents found the possibility of identification worrying these two male respondents made no such comments.

Our survey respondents also provided a good amount of information about the steps they took to protect their own and others’ privacy, including of course blogging anonymously. For example:

However, although many of the bloggers surveyed stated that they took steps to hide their identities and location and the identities of families and friends mentioned in the blog, such care was not consistent. In our 2006 sample, one-quarter of the women and half of the men gave their full name on their blog. The overall figure of 37.5 per cent is comparable with the figure of 31.4 per cent in Herring et al.’s (2004a) sample of 203 English-language blogs. Viégas (2005) states that 55 per cent of her sample of 486 mainly American bloggers gave their real names, but she does not specify that these were ‘full’ names. In addition, 63 per cent of her sample was male. Photographs were given on the blog by 35.4 per cent of the 2006 sample (17 bloggers), which is higher than the 17.5 per cent in Herring’s sample, possibly because technological changes made it easier for people to upload photographs to their blog in the intervening years.

Anonymity may carry a penalty in relation to popular success as it means losing the opportunity to transfer social and cultural capital from the blogger’s real life identity to the blog. Thus women’s greater concerns about privacy on the Internet may be one of the reasons why their blogs are generally less highly rated than men’s – an issue we will return to in a later chapter.

So do concerns about privacy and a desire to retain anonymity impact on the motivations of bloggers? The evidence suggests that such concerns can at least alter a blogger’s behaviour. Once they are aware that someone they know offline is reading their blog, then a blogger may self-censor their opinions or the way in which they describe certain events or feelings, aware of the possible reactions of their offline acquaintance, either online in the comments section of the blog, or face-to-face. Such self-censorship is usually perceived as a negative consequence of having real-life acquaintances reading the blog – I have not come across a blogger who expressed any appreciation for having to introduce a more objective viewpoint in their personal writings, although as we have seen, a comment from a stranger challenging their opinions can be appreciated as refreshing and thought-provoking. Bloggers can also be very aware of possible offline consequences of reckless blogging, whether these are with friends and family or current or even future employers.

There is also a concern, particularly among women bloggers and some gay bloggers, about being identified by strangers because of details on the blog. This leads to bloggers consciously hiding the identities of themselves and others that they blog about although, as we have seen, such an approach is rarely consistent, and a trawl through the archives of most journal blogs can provide a determined would-be stalker or vengeful ex with a good amount of information about a blogger’s location, employment and family. Several of our survey respondents mentioned problems arising from their blogging, either with friends and family or, less frequently, with strangers.

If a blogger is motivated primarily by a desire to keep an online diary for therapeutic reasons or to keep in contact with offline family and friends, then privacy worries can be solved by merely utilising the restrictions offered by providers such as LiveJournal. However, if a blogger wishes to communicate freely online and has started a blog in order to contact others with similar interests or to persuade others with their opinions and knowledge, then such restrictions are not useful and that blogger needs to come to terms with the possibility of losing their anonymity online. As we have seen, some bloggers have chosen to make their personal details available online from the beginning – sometimes because their motivation for blogging (whether commercial or something more spiritual) requires their reader to know who the blogger is. Posts about religion or law may be more convincing when the reader is aware of the qualifications of the blogger to make such statements. Other bloggers are ‘outed’, usually because of the controversial nature of their posts: criticisms of employers or salacious sex stories. On occasion, such bloggers are able to use their consequent notoriety to change career and establish themselves in the media.

The majority of bloggers, however, do not have one nice neat motivation to help them decide whether or not to restrict their readership. As we have seen throughout this book, most bloggers are motivated to blog by a mix of reasons – and such motivations can change as their blogging career progresses. Some bloggers attempt to deal with this problem by having more than one blog – around half of our survey respondents (27 out of 48 respondents in 2006 and 47 out of 104 in 2007) had more than one blog, some of which were of the restricted type for the sake of privacy. Others dealt with the problem by attempting to monitor their output for too much personal information and by changing or fudging details when necessary. Whatever their particular approach to the problem of privacy, and whatever trouble that they had got into because of their blogging, what is most interesting is that the bloggers carried on blogging.