Your Online Writing Life: Protect Your Reputation — and Future (Part Six)

Perhaps this series will never be con­cluded so long as the cre­ative ways in which peo­ple use the Inter­net and the true impact of the infor­ma­tion dis­sem­i­nated via the web con­tinue to be revealed.

“Update: [Name Deleted] Wants to Pay Less” was the title of the post that caught my eye and com­pelled me to begin read­ing. After all, I’m nat­u­rally curi­ous. I fig­ured that the gen­tle­man in ques­tion was prob­a­bly a minor celebrity I had never heard about, but the blog owner was a fan. Next, I con­cluded that the post was prob­a­bly about a celebrity divorce and Mr. [Name Deleted]‘s soon-to-be ex-wife was seek­ing spousal or child sup­port, most likely in a monthly amount that many Amer­i­cans must live on for an entire year.

But as I read on, I real­ized the author was refer­ring to her own son’s father. He appar­ently peti­tioned the court that has juris­dic­tion over cus­tody and sup­port issues, seek­ing to have the amount of his monthly child sup­port pay­ments low­ered. The blog owner voiced her opin­ions on his legal maneu­ver in an extremely vora­cious and col­or­ful manner.

The post imme­di­ately pre­ced­ing that one was enti­tled “About a Boy … [Name Deleted] is Still a Dead­beat.” Therein, the author admit­ted her moti­va­tion for post­ing about what is inar­guably a fam­ily matter:

The rea­son I keep mak­ing these posts by the way is because they show up on a Google search and since I leave the MySpace pro­file and blog open, any­one who is con­sid­er­ing hir­ing [name deleted] or any­thing else can read all about him.

So nat­u­rally, I per­formed a Google search on the gen­tle­man in ques­tion and, sure enough, her blog posts, includ­ing short quotes about him, were the first items indexed.

As I was read­ing, the evening news ran a report on Christie Brinkley’s divorce trial. She lob­bied the court to keep the hear­ing on her cus­tody dis­pute with Peter Cook open. This past Thurs­day, July 3, 2008, tes­ti­mony was offered con­cern­ing Cook’s affairs with other women, fas­ci­na­tion with Inter­net pornog­ra­phy, and rela­tion­ship with their chil­dren. For instance, he tes­ti­fied, “My son told me: ‘Mommy’s look­ing at naked pic­tures of your girl­friends on the com­puter.’” Brinkley’s adult daugh­ter by Billy Joel also tes­ti­fied about the man­ner in which Cook pur­port­edly treated her.

The two sit­u­a­tions involve very dif­fer­ent fam­i­lies. One is a fam­ily of wealthy and priv­i­leged celebrity socialites, while the other, by all indi­ca­tions, is an aver­age Amer­i­can house­hold. But both fam­i­lies include young, impres­sion­able chil­dren and, in both sit­u­a­tions, the details about pri­vate fam­ily dis­putes are being per­ma­nently stored on Inter­net sites where that data will be acces­si­ble in perpetuity.

In both cases, there is a lot of mud being flung at the fathers of those young chil­dren. Truth? I hope, at least for the sake of the blog­ger in ques­tion, that the infor­ma­tion being dis­sem­i­nated is com­pletely accu­rate because if it is not, she has opened her­self up to legal action. But is the rev­e­la­tion jus­ti­fied by its truth?

Many observers, includ­ing child psy­chol­o­gists, have gone on record with their con­cern about Ms. Brinkley’s legal strat­egy, point­ing out that even the most ami­ca­ble divorce has long-lasting effects on the chil­dren of the mar­riage. Legal experts ques­tion why, when seek­ing cus­tody, she would will­ingly sub­mit the sor­did details of her pri­vate life to pub­lic scrutiny. She has stated pub­licly that she wants her chil­dren to know all the dirty details, lead­ing to reports that Mr. Cook’s attor­ney plans to intro­duce the tes­ti­mony of an expert psy­chol­o­gist about her moti­va­tion — revenge — and how it impacts her fit­ness to serve as the cus­to­dial parent.

As for the blog­ger, she writes that she just wants help rais­ing her child from his bio­log­i­cal father. As evi­denced by the tenor of her posts, as well as the lan­guage and empha­sis employed, her writ­ing is moti­vated by anger. She inar­guably rec­og­nizes the poten­tial dam­age her posts could have on the gentleman’s future, includ­ing his abil­ity to secure employ­ment, writ­ing that she doesn’t care that her action may inter­fere with “his chance at some job” because “him get­ting a job does not mean sup­port for me. It just means more money for him because he doesn’t use any of it on his son …”

My pur­pose in writ­ing here is not to judge either woman. Rather, I write for the sole pur­pose of ask­ing whether or not their use of the Inter­net — in Ms. Brinkley’s case, she is using it indi­rectly by being the sub­ject of var­i­ous news sto­ries that are reported on the web — is pru­dent. Inter­net con­tent can be deleted, but the files remain stored and acces­si­ble for an unlim­ited fore­see­able period of time. For instance, now that the var­i­ous search engines have crawled that woman’s blog, her posts will remain vis­i­ble in their cached for­mat and can be intro­duced into evi­dence for a vari­ety of purposes.

Even if the blog­ger does not care about her son’s father’s abil­ity to secure employ­ment, the posts could impact her own future job search, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing that she posted the infor­ma­tion delib­er­ately, with admit­ted knowl­edge of the poten­tial harm they could cause her son’s father, not to men­tion the pro­fane lan­guage employed therein.

And it is not just employ­ers, of course, who uti­lize the Inter­net to per­form back­ground checks. Blog­ging or other use of the Inter­net can result in lost oppor­tu­ni­ties or mem­ber­ships in orga­ni­za­tions one later devel­ops an inter­est in joining.

Every per­son who pub­lishes infor­ma­tion on the Inter­net — in any form on any topic — must be cau­tious and forward-thinking, ask­ing him/herself before click­ing “pub­lish” or “post” whether the data being trans­mit­ted will have a long-term pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive effect on his/her future endeavors.

Addi­tion­ally, as in the case of the blog­ger dis­cussed above, it is crit­i­cal to con­sider whether one’s own Inter­net activ­ity will impact some­one else. If post­ing sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion, espe­cially in rela­tion­ship to a dis­pute of any sort, it is imper­a­tive that data is ver­i­fi­able and accu­rate. Post­ing false infor­ma­tion about oth­ers which results in their suf­fer­ing tan­gi­ble harm can result in legal reme­dies being pur­sued from the per­son who caused the data to be published.

Par­ents, in par­tic­u­lar, need to assess their own thoughts, feel­ings and moti­va­tions before pub­lish­ing infor­ma­tion about their child’s other par­ent, con­sid­er­ing whether they want their child(ren) to read the details when they are old enough to access the Inter­net them­selves. Addi­tion­ally, when chil­dren inevitably ask “Why did you pub­lish that?” par­ents need to have a cogent, con­vinc­ing response ready or risk harm­ing their own rela­tion­ship with their child(ren).

The bot­tom line inquiry is, it seems to me, quite sim­ple. Every blog­ger must antic­i­pate and be pre­pared to take respon­si­bil­ity for his/her online activ­i­ties and accept the con­se­quences asso­ci­ated with his/her use of the Internet.

I won­der if the blog­ger in ques­tion did that or if she will later regret post­ing the details about her legal bat­tles with and feel­ings about her son’s father. And I won­der if Ms. Brink­ley will ulti­mately curse the day she decided to ask the court to hold an open hear­ing, thereby mak­ing the media privy to the sala­cious details of her life with her ex-husband, all of which are now pub­lished on thou­sands of websites.

Only time will tell.

Tech­no­rati Tags: Col­lo­quium on Writing

On the Same Topic:

• I Heard the “D” Word on Christ­mas Day (Part Two)
• In 250 Words or Less …
• Writea­palooza: The Best of 2008
• The Power of a Word
• Scary Christ­mas: Hol­i­day Real­ity Checks