Sunday, April 18, 2004

Personal Details

I asked those surveyed whether or not they have any fears about giving personal details on their weblog.

- 30% of respondents (34/115) said that no, they did not have any fears.
- 15/115 repondents stated they have emotional boundaries when writing in their blogs.
- 9 respondents stated they have "personal boundaries."
- 22% (25/115) said they are wary of giving their location or address.
- 6 respondent stated they were cautious of giving personal details due to internet stalking that had happened to them previously.
- 20 respondents did not use names of family members and family details.
- 2 respondents had been warned by their employers not to blog about work details.
- 7 respondents stated they keep work details private.
- 4 respondents stated that they were wary about blogging about church details.
- 1 respondent said they had been asked by family members not to post "private details" and "family squabbles."
- 1 respondent said information on their blog had led to a family disagreement.

Some interesting comments on the issue of personal details include:

-" I have tended to keep my blog as a place away from people I know personally to explore my thoughts and feelings without fear of judgment or of hurting anyone."
-"Once in a while when I get weird comments I worry that I have given too much information."
-"I don't give away real deep feelings in my life like how lonely I get being single. I try to keep it lighthearted because i don't want anyone seeing all that kind of stuff .it's too personal if my family is reading it."
-"There are two guys that read my blog that have repeatedly tried to stir up trouble for me. One even has a background of doing that sort of thing to other youth pastors."
-" When I began roughly four years ago, I was naive. That has changed via experience. I have through mistake, misapprehension, and misapplication nearly lost my job, damaged irreparably a relationship with a potential spouse's parents, and been brought before the elders of a church where I was teaching a college-age study. In only the first case was there any merit to the problem, but blogs are necessarily free from context and so readers often apply their own imagined context to the text - resulting in conclusions far from those intended."
-"As for personal life stuff, yes, I do often times battle with whether I should share it or not. But, it's not because of strangers, but rather, because of my close friends and family. I just sometimes feel like I don't want to reveal to them some of the deeper day-to-day struggles that I have. But, I'm slowly coming out of that fear and I do share more now than I used to. I think the thing that turned that around for me was the first time I decided to share that I was having a hard time with something and I got a response I was not expecting. That response was that my friends also have those feelings. Who knew?!"

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