Anyone who’s worked in any kind of office at any point in their lives has probably had to sign a contract or a piece of paper that outlines what is acceptable and what is unacceptable behaviour in the office. As part of this often comes a short edict about ‘abuse of the internet’, which generally is taken to mean downloading child pornography or not getting any work done at all because you’re busy playing ‘Go’ on a network with someone in Japan. If you abuse the internet, you will get fired.
Of course abuse of the internet is a fairly loose term, which as yet doesn’t have a consistent meaning between jobs. I remember an article in the press in the UK a few years ago which held that a woman who booked a holiday during her lunch break at work could be fired for abusing the internet. Most of us who live at least a third of our lives online reacted with a certain amount of horror to that. After a while, the net becomes an extension of your head, or your hands, or your ears or your eyes. Being separated from it in a working environment becomes ridiculous. The capacity to chat to a coworker on AIM about a work-related matter becomes normal – as does the ability to ask a friend in another country for a link about icon design.
And then you get to the weblog, which may prove to be the latest thing to be legislated around: via blogroots comes this fairly reasonable policy on weblogs. It’s a balanced view of them – carefully measuring both the need of businesses to cover their own asses and the need for individuals to feel they have online free expression. Unfortunately, while it is eminently pragmatic, that doesn’t mean that it’s actually morally right. Something that seems eminently clear to me is that the needs of business impinge on the rights of the individual to have a life ‘outside work’ a hell of a lot more than they should…