Freedom of Blog

I was sitting at the dinner table the other night having a family discussion (by this we all know I mean argument). Just as any other week, it was an occasion of adults versus children. Of course the adults insist that if we are not agreeing with them, this is a reflection of the lack of respect from teenagers in modern society towards their elders. Regardless of their pitiless attempts to make us feel guilty about our opinions, we continued to banter about being careful towards how much information we give about ourselves on our social networking websites. Our parents adamantly believe that we are at the constant risk of identity fraud, and ruining our futures by having social networking sites in the first place because “10 years from now employers will bring up all the things you did on the internet and you will never get hired.” Us children insisted that they would not find anything worth using against us, to which my mother replied “you don’t think they won’t fire you for having promiscuous photos of you with your tongues hanging out?” By this she means photos of you poking your tongue out at the camera, which is often mistaken to be very sexually enticing…..sure…..And I know you are probably thinking that youth and promiscuous photos happen to appear all over the internet, however, I can assure you my family does not at all give off the “easy” vibe….we don’t get picked up…that person would break their back…and its just not our style…….

We continued like this for a while, and eventually decided to load up the computer to see potentially what employers could find out about us… my name was put in first, being an avid user of the internet…and the first google result that popped up was my WordPress Blog … the one in fact about my current place of employment! Yikes! Ok ok so they may have had a point….

Before we continue, and I know you are currently reading a blog, but i felt it was important you understand just how blogs work so that you can fully grasp the concept of the situation.

I went home that night, and immediately destroyed the post about work….I knew that I had posted it in the public sphere, I just hadn’t realised when you typed my name into google, that one would be returned first….My family had said to me I better be careful about what I post because it could get me fired. Which then made me think about all those headliners of people being fired for blogging, twittering or facebook status updating about their jobs, and how much freedom of speech we have as bloggers….

Whilst a blogger may not professionally be considered a journalist, they are still publishing texts that become widely distributed across the complex networks of the internet, and once something is published, it will forever have an imprint in cyberspace, even if you delete your content, someone may have had the chance to copy and paste or print-screen your post. Basically, you have to assume you are always being watched. I googled “freedom of speech and blogs” just to see if I could find any information about how serious the implications of a bad blog could be. I found a post about blogging freedom of speech which went into detail about cases in China of slandering and the potential consequences, and even how in the US, you could say something negative about the government, and whilst inherently you do not mean what you are being prosecuted for, the people investigating your blog will make implicit connections that just do not exist….what we say here in Australia can also get us in trouble overseas, and currently as Australian citizens there is no Constitution or legislation that protect our freedom of speech, and all the Government has done is passed legislation to restrict the freedom of speech.

We utilise our blogs to express ourselves, that was the purpose of their construction, existence and future. We use them to interact with other bloggers and just generally other content on the internet, talking about what we do and don’t like and what we do and don’t agree with. Freedom of speech should be tolerated in relation to blogs….when reading blogs it should be in the mindset that you understand you are perving on someone elses private thoughts, and should take this into account when evaluating their content. They aren’t doing it for propaganda reasons, but to talk about the way they feel. It is understood that blogs have the potential to harm and offend more than just a few members of society, but being able to talk about your opinions and beliefs are one of the attractions of blogs. Not only to the blogger, but more so to their audience, especially in terms of a political genre of blogs, which have been constructed to openly talk about a person’s viewpoint on the state of the government and related topics. As blogging is a relatively new form of publication there hasn’t been much opportunity for governments or the international legal environment to pass legislation or bills to regulate the content….but how can you when there are so many gateways to get around them? How do we regulate or protect bloggers rights for that matter, when the internet is not a contained or definable publication medium. It is forever expanding, diversifying, and there is no limit to it’s capabilities…the internet grows as we grow and as we cannot measure cyber space there is no telling when it will reach its boundaries….

It is hard to take a side on how free our freedom speech should be in a blog. On the one hand it is very necessary to protect society from blogs that may talk about or include reference to harming children etc, and on the other hand once we start censoring blogs some people can take it to the extreme, and to give them the ability to sue over comments and remarks made in someone’s blogs that they may find offensive we can never control, because who is to measure the limit on how offended someone can be? That and we would have to start censoring the internet, which hinders our right to the freedom of information.

Do you think that the freedom of speech should apply to blogs? Or do you believe there should be rammifications for offensive content in our blogs? How far is too far in a blog? And how can we know where to stop?

For more information you can refer to the Bloggers’ Rights page.

FAA – Food Addicts Anonymous

Isn’t it weird how sometimes you never know something about yourself until someone else points it out for you?

This last Saturday I was at work. It was a fairly quiet day after a busy week of new stock deliveries. Usually deliveries aren’t that exciting, however this month, was a month of new release cook books, and the week of the new October Delicious magazine. I suppose for some, this event would not ever be worth drawing attention to, however for me, I felt like a fat kid with cake…..quite literally. My face lit up at the prospect of a quiet Saturday with the ability to flick through the new cook books and marvel at the glory of all the wonderful food photographs and recipes.

I know this is beginning to sound kind of weird, but I wasn’t alone. My colleague and I have a ritual of rating the cookbooks based on presentation,

photography, and of course recipes, and thus this is what we did on Saturday. We managed to make it through all the new books and the magazine. It was a hectic day, and we finally decided that Jamie’s America was a clear winner in terms of the best cook book of the day, however, Stephanie Alexander’s Kitchen Garden Companion was definitely a book that deserved a lifetime award (the Kitchen Garden Cooking with Kids is also fabulous for those with green thumbs and green kids). When we were completed, we returned all the books to their respected areas on the ‘Cooking’ wall, and gleefully returned to the counter feeling very euphoric. I do believe my face could have been glowing. My colleague turned to me and said that it wasn’t until she met me that she appreciated food quite so much, and that I was a bit of a food addict.

This is not new to me. It is something I have always known in the back of my mind… I always knew I was a foodie…I just never though of myself as an addict. It was later that week that my dad pointed out that he thinks 90% of the time I converse with someone, the topic is in relation to food. I quickly rewound the days events and skimmed through what I could remember, stop-starting at points of conversation…and alas….it was true. It then sparked another thought that not only when I am talking to people do I think about food. I often use my free day dreaming time to contemplate wonderous recipes and potential concoctions of goodies I can master for dinner. At home when I’m bored in between refreshing Facebook I read food blogs, such as Not Quite Nigella, which are beginning to beat my love of cook books, as they are updated more regularly, and can provide faster satisfaction.

I have never thought that my adoration of anything edible could be a bad thing. I think of myself as a Samantha from Sex and the City in the food world, just more Steffi in Food and the Recipe. You could say I was very confident in my restaurant food-ality. I am what one might term a try-foodual….i’ll try anything once! And I’m a bit of a restaurant whore. I work my way around the city and take my friends along. The more the merrier, and these things can get dirty. Some of my…alright who am I kidding, ALL of my…..fondest childhood memories revolve around a family meal. Having grown up in a family of European descent, I am sure you are aware of their obsession with meals and gatherings around meals. Even today, when we meet up for friends it’s usually for coffee or a dinner party….and thus to me, an intense relationship with food could only make sense. Perhaps one day I might make a career out of it. I think the best job in the entire world would to be a global food critic! To be paid to travel, and eat exotic and delicious foods could only a positive right?