BloggerslearnpriceoftellingtoomuchBlogsa
Bloggers learn price of telling too much Blogs are everywhere — increasingly, the place where young people go to bare their souls, to vent, to gossip.And often they do so with fervor and little self-editing, posting their innermost thoughts for any number of web surfers to see.There is a freedom in it, as 23-year-oldAllison Martin says: "Since the people who read my blog are friends or acquaintances of mine, my philosophy is to be totally honest — whether it’’s about how uncomfortable my hat are or my opinions about FirstAmendment law," says Martin, who lives in suburbanChicago and has been blogging for four years.Some are, however, finding that putting one’’s life online can have a price.
A、few bloggers, for instance, have been fired for writing about work on personal online journals.And Maya Marcel-Keyes, daughter of conservative politicianAlan Keyes, discovered the trickiness of providing personal details online when her discussions on her blog about being a lesbian became an issue during her father’’s recent run for a U.S. Senate seat in Illinois (he made anti-gay statements during the campaign). Experts say such incidents belong to a growing trend in which frank outpourings online are causing personal and public dramas, often taking on a life they couldn’’t have if the Web had not come along and turned individuals into publishers.Some also speculate that more scandalous blog entries will have ramifications (支流) down the roaD、"I would bet that in the 2016 election, somebody’’s Facebook entry will come back to bite them," Steve Jones, head of the communications department at the University of Illinois, says, referring to thefacebook.com, a networking site for college students and alumni that is something of a cross between a yearbook and a blog. More traditional blog sites — which allow easy creation of a Web site with text, photos and often music — include LiveJournal and MySpace.And they’’ ve gotten more popular in recent years, especially among the younger setSurveys completed in recent months by the Internet &American Life Project found that nearly a fifth of teens who have access to the Web have their own blogs.And 38% of teens say they read other people’’s blogs.By comparison, about a tenth of adults have their own blogs and a quarter say they read other people’’s online journals. Amanda Lenhart, a researcher who tracks young people’’s Internet habits, says she’’s increasingly hearing stories about the risks of posting the equivalent of a diary online.Other times, the ease of posting unedited thoughts on the Web can be uglier, in part because of the speed with which the postings spread and multiply. That’’s what happened at a middle school in Michigan last fall, the principals started receiving complaints from parents about some students’’ blog postings. School officials couldn’’t do much about it.But then the students found out they were being monitored, a few posted threatening comments aimed at an assistant principal — and that led to some student suspensions."It was just a spiraling (螺旋) of downward emotions," says the school’’s principal. She spoke on the condition that she and her school not be identified, out of fear that being named would cause another Web frenzy. "Kids just feed into to that and then more kids see it and so on," she says. "It’’s a negative power — but it’’s still a power."Lenhart, the researcher, likens blogs to the introduction of the telephone and the effect it had on teen’’s ability to communicate in the last century. She agrees that the Web has "increased the scope" of young people’’s communication even more. "But at the root of it, we’’re talking about behaviors middle-schoolers have engaged in through the millennia," Lenhart says. "The march of technology forward is hard, and it has consequences that we don’’t always see." She says parents would be wise to familiarize themselves with online blogging sites and to pose questions t