Tuesday 16 June 2009

Who is the Plashing Vole?

Most of you know anyway, but I'd rather be discreet because I don't want to get myself or anyone else in trouble, including my institution.

So I'm a little concerned that the High Court has determined that anonymous bloggers can be identified by the press - that blogging is a 'public activity' which doesn't carry the right to privacy. I guess this is logical, but it doesn't make me feel any more comfortable. I'm likely to be much more truthful when the threat of the sack doesn't hang over me, and having a secret identity, as well as being cool, means that readers don't treat me as their teacher.

All this has come about thanks to a case involving Nightjack, a police blogger who won the George Orwell Prize this year. There are lots of uniformed bloggers including paramedics and others - presumably the demands of the job, the strict rules, the requirement of obedience wthout question and the daily exposure to the best and worst of human life are conducive to good, critical blogging. Much better than my 'went to a committee today'… Added to that - copper tend to be very rightwing, which leads to strongly expressed, simplistic opinions which work well on blogs. Nightjack's conservative but interesting.

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