Gormangate and Croningate: Prominent individuals in the library academia and professional associations write columns criticizing bloggers and are themselves flooded with criticism. A few responses were supportive, some were nuanced responses, others expressed strong disagreement on the issues (how I view my own responses). There was also a large number of mostly anonymous personal attacks.
Los Alamos Bloggers: An anonymous employee-run blog airs employees’ frustration about the management of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In what would have been an organization’s nightmare, much dirty laundry was aired which was noticed in Washington DC and may have precipitated the departure of its unpopular director.
The Dog Shit Girl: A young Korean woman flouts manners and norms by refusing to clean up after her dog on a train. She is photographed, the photo is uploaded onto the internet, where she is identified and humiliated. She thought that she had been an anonymous face in the crowd, but once her identity had been discovered she was vulnerable to what was arguably disproportionate punishment at the hands of a cyber posse. There's one thing about this incident which I'd really like to know - were most of the people involved in bringing gae-ttong-nyue to justice, were they using their own names, pseudonyms or were they anonymous?
An anonymous author (“Ivan Tribble is the pseudonym of a humanities professor at a small liberal-arts college in the Midwest.”) writes an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, stating that having a named blog is often viewed as a negative by university search panels. “The content of the blog may be less worrisome than the fact of the blog itself. Several committee members expressed concern that a blogger who joined our staff might air departmental dirty laundry (real or imagined) on the cyber clothesline for the world to see. Past good behavior is no guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum.”
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