Funk Babblings

I've mentioned a few times that I enjoy the writing of Amanda Marcotte (pandagon_amanda) at Pandagon (pandagon_net). She's an outspoken Texan feminist, liberal, music fan, atheist (yet leader and prophet of the Church of the Mouse and Disco Ball), heavily inspired in her writing by the late Molly Ivins.

A couple weeks ago she announced that she'd been hired as blogmistress for the John Edwards presidential campaign, and would (sadly) be reducing her Pandagon blogging in order to focus on this great new opportunity. She said she strongly supported his candidacy and his positions on the issues, and was looking forward to helping him win.

( Then the knives came out. )

So it was little surprise to me when I read Amanda's announcement today that she's resigned from the Edwards campaign. She said she had become a target that risked the Edwards campaign "every time [she] coughed", so she couldn't effectively do the job she was hired to do. And of course, being part of the campaign meant that she couldn't respond the the attacks herself, while being outside the campaign allows her to respond as only she can.

(Selfishly, I'm happy that I'll get to read the unfiltered Amanda again.)

This whole episode is relevant to all of us who live our lives partially online. If we're smart, we don't make public anything that we think could hurt us in our future careers, but it can sometimes be difficult to make that prediction. Maybe our future employers, like the Edwards campaign, will have no problem with (or awareness of) what we've written. But what about their rivals and competitors? Will some third party use our past personal writings to attack us and our employers?

As one blogger put it, "Blogger pelt season is now open."

This sort of thing will only get worse as more people put more of their lives online in various ways. Not just blogs, but other sorts of social networking sites, web forums, Flickr photos, all may make us vulnerable in some way we may not anticipate. Knowledge of this prompts many people to try to hide under varying levels of pseudonymity (complete anonymity online is nearly impossible without a lot of work), but a determined effort will eventually be able to break through that veil. Others of us just hope that being ourselves will be good enough, and that anyone who objects to that can be ignored; circumstances don't always play out that well though.

Luckily, most situations aren't nearly as cutthroat as political campaigns.

Updates:

1. Pandagon seems to be back up and running now.
2. Melissa McEwan, the other blogger involved in this controversy, has also resigned.
3. Neither Edwards nor the other candidates have distinguished themselves in this mess.
4. "We Are All Melissa and Amanda."
5. Amanda has written her side of the story, "Why I had to quit the Edwards campaign", over at Salon. (Linking to the article through Pandagon avoids having to watch an ad.)