Will Writing About Women's Privacy on the Web Haunt Journalists' Careers?

There's a growing constellation of stories the unintended impact of the Internet on privacy, particularly relating to employment, particularly relating to women. The Washington Post had a story last week about AutoAdmit, a law school discussion board that evidently is having a negative impact on the hiring prospects of law students who are gossipped about there. Lindsay Beyerstein and Jill at Feministe talk about it; Jill was slimed on the board also.

Melissa Gira at Sexerati pointed us last month to Emily Nussbaum's article in New York Magazine, "Say Everything," about how youth participation in as MySpace, FaceBook, Flickr, and other Internet social networking phenomena are changing their understandings of the meaning of privacy. The link has been sitting around in my to-be-blogged queue, to the point where Xeni Jardin picked it up for Boing Boing last Friday, so that means I better blog it quickly, if I do at all, because its hip factor has started to decay exponentially.

Laurie Edison and Debbie Notkin are in dialogue with Susannah Breslin about The New York Times Magazine's exposé sober examination of college sex magazines like Boink and H Bomb. To be sure, these college sex magazines appear to be more printed presences than Internet ones; but something about the discussion seems to me to fit in.

And today's San Francisco Chronicle warns young ladies of the Web 2.0 generation that those sexy photos on the Web "could plague women in years ahead." The article leads out with the story of Y.M. Chang, participating in CollegeHumor.com's America's Hottest College Girl competion at the same time she is interviewing for engineering jobs after graduation. A male friend submitted Chang's picture, and she discovered only later that she was a finalist competing for $10,000.

Why are all these articles focusing on women? It could be because of the naughty picture angle – there are many more naughty pictures of women than of men, and our culture doesn't regard barechested men anywhere near so sexually as it does barechested women. Men don't get slut-shamed the way women do.

I predict, though, that in 2008 there will be more than one race for national office in which the Internet activity of one of the candidates will become an issue. It might be blogging, it might be something on MySpace, or perhaps some pol's pseudonymous account on Alt.com will be outed.