How much should one share on a blog? TL;DR “Totally the author’s decision, but my governing rule is “I try not to tell other people’s stories””.

That’s why my last post sounded so very vague about some things that had happened in my life, even as I thanked others for sharing their stories.

In December 2007, five months after the first iPhone was released, a year after Facebook first allowed people with non “.edu” addresses to create profiles, I wrote about my decision to try not to tell other people’s stories, in a post about Drawing the veil … .

Chiefly I was thinking about co-workers and my kids. My decision was not only about privacy for others, but I reasoned that even if the person in question had given me permission, or even wanted me to tell their stories, publishing it on this blog altered my relationship with other co-workers. Would they think I was looking at what they were doing as blog fodder? I didn’t really want to add that layer to my work relationships. Likewise, I respected my kids’ privacy, and that of their friends and schoolmates, so minimised how much I discussed them.

I didn’t tell the story at the time, but it was actually in response to an incident at work where I was extremely confronted. I’m OK with telling it now because I can anonymise it, and if it makes my current workmates feel worried that I may tell a vague story about them in 12 years time, I can live with that impact on our work relationships today. The incident made me feel about 100 years old and like the world’s biggest fuddy-duddy.

I was running a “23 Things” project that involved staff blogging, and a member of staff far younger than me was taking part. The blog they linked to as part of the staff project was used for posts other than for the project. Mentioning work. Including a conversation with their supervisor. One that revealed information about them, their supervisor and work circumstances that had not been revealed to their co-workers.

It was my job to explain to them, with the help of supervisor, why it was not on. As I tried to explain I was seeing a nodding head, with a look of total incomprehension in the eyes. What seemed obvious to me about workplace decorum and social media evidently was not universally apparent.

Even worse, this was the days before organisations had grappled with social media, so I had no idea what was a reasonable (and even legal) way to ask this person to deal with the posts. Today, it would be much clearer. Then, I tried to appeal to their better nature and explain the likely impact on their co-workers if the co-workers stumbled across the posts as I had. What I did not do was request that they remove the posts from their blog, or tackle the issue of why they should not have made them in the first place… although the supervisor and I did work toward a solution that the person in question agreed with.

THAT was what led to me trying to articulate a personal policy on my blog.

It sounds unbelievable now, but many bloggers, like me, had not thought about the issue in any depth until something like that forced us to.

I discovered among the comments for that post my speculation:

“I wonder what we’ll be thinking about my self-imposed limitation in ten years, or even five? I wonder whether I’ll seem like I was being terribly fussy and prim.?”

It’s kind of nice to look back and think that I probably made exactly the right choice for me, one that has worked to help me decide what I share in my online life.

It also makes me wonder what other challenges to privacy or communication or …boundaries??… are around the corner as work/life/social media …even government policy and governance…blur further. What other things that seem self-evident to me about navigating this world would cause a 20 year old to gaze at me with total incomprehension?