The Hobson's Choice That Is Our Digital Worlds

I spoke recently on Paul's site and also alluded here on my own of the difficulties I'm having at the moment. Speaking up about the incongruities - and sometimes the downright injustices - of the economic world we live in is very easy when you don't have a big employer breathing down your neck. But subtle mind games are part and parcel of working in large corporations. Thus it is that I cannot even talk about my work in a throwaway fashion on Facebook.

All well and good, you may say. Who is ever going to want to piss on their own turf? (Unless, of course, you happen to be a member of the Labour Party - in which case it kind of comes with the territory.) But, if truth be told, those who are best placed to offer a useful opinion on anything that happens on this planet are those who work at the coalface. In a global village of digital worlds the permanence of our words can far outreach their intended weight. In this sense, I can understand big companies' reluctance to allow its workforce to communicate as anyone else might.

I can understand it but I do not approve.

For the man or woman at the coalface has a right to say what they think. If large companies truly believe in a work/life balance, they must also contemplate us being able to talk about work in those parts of our life which are not work. And these days, that may almost exclusively mean Facebook, Twitter and blogging.

Otherwise we are, as communicative, social and democratic subjects, being disenfranchised by the powerful in yet more insidious ways.

I no longer feel free to speak. I censor even my thoughts, before they can spring to mind.

Is that healthy?

Am I in the right job?

Should I simply retire from what I do and find somewhere else which may offer me the freedoms I feel I have a right to?

And, yet, would that not be me throwing in the towel? Should I not stay and hold my ground? Is there any point to contemplating such a quixotic enterprise?

Observations and advice most welcome from you all.