Why Self-Censorship?

When I write, I write about things that interest's me and what is on my mind at the moment.
Lately I have had my mind full of work and some pretty awesome development that is going on there. The problem is that when I signed my contract of employment it stated, in short, that I am not allowed to reveal company secrets.

What are and what are not company secrets can be discussed but the main issue here is that there is now another filter that I subconsciously think about when I write. And this brought up another subject that interests me - self-censorship.

Self-censorship on Facebook

A few weeks ago while I was browsing, I stumbled across a research paper concerning self-censorship on Facebook. The focus in this paper was on last-minute self-censorship. That is to say when you start writing in the status bar on Facebook, but then decide not to post it. It was published by Facebook themselves (a list of their publications can be found here) and is, as they mention themselves, an exploratory work where the focus is mainly demographic and evaluating basic assumptions. But there is one of the results that I found was especially interesting:

Snapshot from the results section in "Self-Censorship on Facebook"

This correlation between diverse friends and self-censorship was not fully in-line with the original hypothesis that the researchers had. It is not clear which ones causes the other - Do people who self-censor less have a higher tendency of befriending diverse friends or do people who have a diverse friend-base, self-censor less? Either way it is an interesting correlation that I hope more research will be done on.

Personal self-censorship

I am a person that uses social media avidly, maybe because of sheer relief. It is not that I do not know the dangers of gossip and social media. I grew up in an environment where the police would circle our apartment block weekly to check up on the area. It was always assumed that whatever we said to our neighbours it would always find it's way to the police. Once while I was out walking our dog I was brought in to the police station by a friendly policeman and questioned by two-three policemen about my family and life and my parent's work. I was twelve.
My parents were always clear to both my sister and I that it was important to think through what we said. We were always asked to think about how it would be perceived by people who don't go to church, haven't lived in another country or gone to school.

Artwork by Askin Ayrancioglu, faced a lawsuit because the art was objectionable.

This type of lifestyle bred self-censorship like nothing else ever could. Once I got my fingers on blogging and social media it was a  relief to me. I could write down my thoughts first and be able to view them afterwards and censor at will before it was visible to everyone. I could take time thinking about what I wanted to share instead of not being able to share anything due to the time-constraint.

Self-censorship at the workplace

In my own experience self-censorship is most prominent in the work environment. I hadn't realised how much I subconsciously self-censor until I had a longer period where my main social interaction had been with my colleagues. The relief of being "myself" when I was with my friends surprised me because I had not been aware that I had been doing anything differently. It made me think back to the different work places I have been at and the level of work-related self-censorship that is noticeable.

Why do we self-censor at work? Apart from the usual reasons to self-censoring it seems we have more to lose making it more important to be careful.

George Orwell's essay on "Politics and the English Language" written in 1946 touches on one of the reasons to self-censorships at the workplace when he writes:

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity."

Each individual at a workplace have their own incentives and goals. These do not always align 100% with the goals of a company, even though good company management will do their best to build a company structure that aligns them as much as possible. It is therefore important for the individual to be careful of what they say as saying the wrong thing may disrupt the individual's goal.

The second reason I think has to do with communication. When it comes to language and culture, the workplace is a very static place, compared to "the real world" of friends and social media. It is harder for companies to adapt to new cultural and language innuendos usually because change is expensive for a company.

 Due to this static state there will arise differences to how people communicate with each other at work compared with how they communicate outside. 

A simple example of this difference is just the way communication has moved from email to other systems. Using email is a rare occurrence with my friends as I will use tools such as chat, Dropbox and document sharing programs which I would find more efficient. This switch means that my communication would be more about updates. 

I will write a short chat update saying "Filled in the document" and as everyone has access to the same document and are able to see what changes I have done, writing anything else in the chat would be in excess and seen as a nuisance as people get the chat message straight away and just want an update so they know what's happening.

Compare this to an email where it would be important to introduce the reason to writing, to whom it concerns, state the changes that have been made and specify on how to proceed and where the latest document has been saved. It is more important here to get a summary of everything than when receiving a chat message.

This difference in communication ways make you unsure of what will be understood in the correct way. The uncertainty of whether everyone has watched the latest funny video on Youtube makes you careful with making a reference to it. Not being sure if the boss understands the latest modern word, you will go with wording it in a more traditional fashion.