Blog, Sex, and the Single Delta Employee

Jeffrey Rosen has an article, Your Blog Or Mine?, in today’s New York Times Magazine. The art is fun. The text, from this self-appointed master of the privacy/legal hyperplex, needs a bit more consideration…

Rosen starts with the well-known story of Jessica Cutler, who was a staffer for Senator Mike DeWine, earning $25,000-a-year (in Washington!), and selling sex on the side to make ends meet. She wrote about it in her blog and, as you probably heard, sold a $300,000 novel based on the experience to Hyperion after she was fired.

Rosen argues that the boundrires between the personal and the public are being redefined by blogs, then ties this back to the 1890 Brandeis/Warren article. “In the age of blogs, all citizens, no matter how obscure, will have to adjust their behavior to the possibility that someone may be writing about them,” observes Rosen.

Have you moderated your behavior because somebody in your house is blogging? I haven’t. I know that my wife hasn’t, either.

I’m I’m quite the blogger. Beyond this blog, there are two (nameless) others that I keep. And I read the blogs of a whole bunch of people — most of them teenagers. Why read teenager blogs? Because they’re the future, and I want to know where the world is going.

Interesting fact: A survey of 500 bloggers found that a 1/3 had “gotten in trouble” for material posted on their blog. A third knew of bloggers who had gotten in trouble with family and friends. Those writing writing about “highly personal materials” got into trouble most often of all.

For another side of this story, check out Ellen Simonetti’s article in ZDNet, I was fired for blogging, in which Ellen, Queen of the Sky, recounts how she was grounded by Delta for posting photographs of herself in uniform on a personal website.

No word, though, on the photos’ style.