Motivations for police blogging and how fear of being 'outed' can force a blogger to cease.

Pedersen, Sarah; Burnett, Simon; Smith, Robert; Neill, Anne

Abstract

There is an expanding literature on the police use of storytelling, but very little has been written in a policing context in relation to the contemporary practice of blogging. Consequentially, this paper reports on an ongoing research project into the UK police use of blogging. In dealing with motivations for starting and stopping the authoring of blogs this article makes an incremental contribution to the literatures of blogging and of police storytelling by articulating reasons given by respondents as to why they stopped blogging. These include fear of being outed; fear of professional loss of face and collateral damage to careers. We argue that blogging has educational and therapeutic values and should be encouraged by the Service for these reasons. An agreed code of practice could reduce the climate of fear.

Citation

PEDERSEN, S., BURNETT, S., SMITH, R. and NEILL, A. 2013. Motivations for police blogging and how fear of being 'outed' can force a blogger to cease. Selected papers of internet research [online], 13: selected papers from the 13th Association of Internet Researchers conference (IR 13.0), 18-21 October 2012, Salford, UK, article number 8219. Available from: https://spir.aoir.org/ojs/index.php/spir/article/view/8219

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: 13th Association of Internet Researchers conference (IR 13.0)
• Start Date: Oct 18, 2012
• End Date: Oct 21, 2012
• Acceptance Date: Dec 31, 2012
• Online Publication Date: Dec 31, 2012
• Publication Date: Dec 31, 2012
• Deposit Date: Nov 22, 2012
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 22, 2012
• Journal: Selected papers of internet research
• Publisher: AoIR Association of Internet Researchers
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 13
• Article Number: 8219
• Keywords: Blogs; Blogging; Police; Motivations; Censorship
• Public URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10059/777
• Publisher URL: https://spir.aoir.org/ojs/index.php/spir/article/view/8219
• Contract Date: Nov 22, 2012