"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I would find something in them to have him hanged." -- Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642)
Richelieu wrote this in the 17th century but his words are truer today than they ever have been before. If you're reading this column right now chances are you have a digital footprint. If you e-mail me with a .edu e-mail address I can pull you up on Facebook. If you're writing from a company I can track you down that way. If you have a name that isn't shared by a thousand people, I can find you on Google.
Complete anonymity in the Internet age is gone; we all have six lines that are public today. When today's online sports world is combined with an easily offended society and corporations expect silence (or tepid ubiquity) from their employees when they aren't working, this means everyone is just a few online scribbles away from being fired. That's because, for better or worse, life has migrated to the Internet.
That migration has produced a new question: What degree of privacy can you expect for your Internet life? The answer, right now, is virtually none.
Barely a week goes by without someone being raked over the media coals for online pictures or comments. This is particularly the case with sports figures and, most recently, sports bloggers.
In the 21st century every fan can have their say, but everyone's employer can also read what they say. And the fissure between these two positions, online freedom and employability, is where an awful lot of conflict is coming these days. Corporate policies on Internet life have yet to catch up with their younger employees' reality. In fact many young employees consider their online lives to be an extension of their own private lives.
We can debate whether that's a valid position (plainly given the public access to postings it's not actually private). What we can't debate is that this issue is going to continue to grow in importance, particularly because the individuals in charge of policing their employees are of a different generation. And with each passing day the odds of their employees not being online in some capacity becomes more remote.
If you're in a management position it's easy to castigate your younger employees for doing something, posting on the Internet, that you didn't do when you were their age. Public drunkenness, off-color jokes and written rebellion aren't the sole province of Generation Y, but their public availability and instantaneous consumption is new.
It used to be that if you wanted to know what other fans thought about your team, you engaged in face-to-face discussions or listened to talk radio. Now, you go to the Internet. Because of the passion they engender, postings on sports life have become one of the driving forces behind Internet expression and also one of the major flashpoints for the intersection between a fan's private life and their professional life.
Indeed, sports blogging is so mainstream now that the only people who haven't realized that yet are old columnists at dying newspapers and their bosses. Most intelligent sports fans under the age of 30 can't even name their local newspaper columnist but they're consuming sports online. To a large degree that's because modern newspapers don't write in a way that's relevant to today's society. I could spend a series of columns explaining why that is (and perhaps I will) but right now if you're young and intelligent and you're interested in being entertained about sports you get your information online. Period.
I think the reason is two-fold; timeliness and access. You sit at a computer all day, so why rely on the dated ramblings of a printed newspaper when the news is continuing to evolve throughout the day? Regarding access -- it's much easier to pretend that you're working while reading a column on the Internet than it is while reading a newspaper.
When I started at a law firm I noticed how much time I spent reading news online. I e-mailed to ask my friends how many of them would feel comfortable opening up a paper or a book and reading it at their desk. Not one single person said they would. Yet, no one even thought twice about reading the same thing from their computer screen.
As our digital footprints have grown, so too has the amount of time we all spend online. What hasn't changed is the way our online lives are scrutinized by employers. Many sports bloggers choose anonymity because they recognize their bosses might not approve of what they write. Of course, many mainstream journalists then criticize this anonymity (while trotting out the clichéd and inaccurate example of bloggers writing from their mother's basement). Whenever talented bloggers who are widely read choose to reveal themselves and come out of the blogging closest, danger beckons.
