Erik Marshall

This article (reg required) in today’s NYTimes poses some interesting questions about employment and expression. Summary: An employee of technorati posted a blog entry intended “to provide a harsh comment on the growing fears among corporations over the blogging activities of their employees” and technorati asked him to take it down. He complied.

This story keeps coming up. Someone gets fired or warned or censored for something on a usually non-work-related blog. The article brings up interesting issues, including privacy and freedom of expression, as well as the following:

But does that means that Mr. Kennedy, a short-timer, a product manager and by no means an executive at Technorati, carries the burden of representing the company into his personal blog?

Technorati’s vice president for engineering, Adam Hertz, responded: “It would be antithetical to our corporate values to force Niall to do anything in his blog. It’s his blog.”

Yet with the spread of the Internet and of blogging, Mr. Hertz said, it would be foolish for companies to not spend some time discussing the art of public communications with their employees, and even train and prepare lower-level staff for these kinds of public relations situations.

This raises some interesting questions for me, and academic workers in general. To what extent am I expected to “represent” the university for which I work? I make no claims to speak for the university, and I am, at times, openly critical of it. This blog is not hosted on university servers, which may add a layer of complexity to the analysis, and is intended as a personal blog about various issues, including not only film, media and communication but also teaching and academia generally. But if someone objects to my politics, criticism or writing in general, would the university, as my employer, have the right to “ask” me to rescind something? I honestly doubt that this would happen, but it does make me wonder.

On another note, I like technorati, so I would neither initiate nor advocate any action against it, but wouldn’t it be ironic if someone did decide to boycott technorati, using the service itself as an initial organizing tool for the boycott?