I was talking with a colleague in the pub on Friday evening about weblogs and the merits of one blogging service against the other. Apparently he chose blogspot because he dislikes the idea that livejournal users can form friendgroups and thus to screen off comments so that different people can see different posts. I like livejournal for precisely the same reason.
Upon occasion I have considered going *friends only*, but I haven’t because I do like the idea that complete strangers can stumble upon my musings, like something, or be intrigued and read more. More than this, stumbling upon people’s journals (principally through their comments in other peoples journals) is how I’ve made some very good friends here.
I started this journal shortly after I suffered some quite unpleasant bullying. My original thought in starting this journal, is that I needed to *put myself out there a bit more*, and I needed to develop my self-confidence. I wasn’t expecting this journal to last long, hence me begging a free invite code from tinyjo, however within a month I had got enough out of the experience that it convinced me to buy a paid account.
Since then I have met some absolutely incredible people who have helped me develop as a writer, listen to my deepest fears, and help me to grow as a person. To this end I have a number of filters set up and no one but me knows exactly who is on which filter or which filter I am using. Even so I do post the majority of posts to a public forum, but the point is I don’t think I would feel comfortable posting everything to a public forum – and consequently I would post less full stop.
I think blogspot is improved now, in that you can post comments, but there still doesn’t seem to be same sense of community (that I value in livejournal) and you can’t choose (as far as I know) to make some posts private – or semi-private.
The odd thing about what grandpontgenie was asserting, was that in his opinion, unless you have a subscription service (like my own synergy, you shouldn’t limit who can see your writing – and that if you do this, you are somehow removing from the internet what it was invented to do.
Hrmm… I’m not sure about that…?
I think it’s perfectly acceptable to have some things be public and others only shown to certain people. Perhaps this person has never had something he posted on the internet in a public forum bite him on the ass later on.
Lots of people hide details about their jobs from public view because it’s very easy for an employer to find you. And if you said something unflattering, well, then you’re in trouble!
you shouldn’t limit who can see your writing – and that if you do this, you are somehow removing from the internet what it was invented to
I think he’s silly 😉 If it’s a choice between screening, and not posting at all … if LJ did not have a friends-only option I would either not have an LJ, or I would write posts about my cats every day. I like to write about more personal things, and I like to have an idea of who’s reading. Yeah, it’s not 100% safe, but I can be reasonably certain that my parents won’t stumble across it. That’s the most important thing to me.
How come you always manage to articulate things so much better than me?
It’s interesting though – this post I *chose* to make public and also remove the screening of anonymous comments…
I noticed that 😉
Um, I mean your second point of course, not your first one! 😛
I am in the unusual position (I imagine) of being a parent whose children also have LJs. They may well screen some of their posts from me, but I certainly don’t screen mine from them. Sometimes, they write things that I don’t feel comfortable with and they may well reciprocate – the thing is, I respect them as people and I fully expect that they will not be clones of me and will have their own ideas and sensibilities and if they choose to use language that I dislike – so be it – they’re not using it in my house. I have no idea what they screen from me, and I really don’t care. I would hope that, if they consider it important enough, they will talk to me about it.
I don’t screen anything. Here we come to the crux of it: although I am happy to read or ignore whatever my children write (and if that means, on occasion, slagging off the parents, that’s ok), I do hold back a great deal when talking about myself and my relationships – not that I’m holding a great deal back, but I think that there should be some distance between parents and children, and that if there is some area of mystique, then in that case, the parent should hold the upper hand. What I mean is, I suppose, that if I were to reveal everything about myself to my children, it might distort their sense of me – and their love to me is everything – whereas, nothing my children could do or say could every alter my fundamental love and trust in them.
Aww, I’ll always love you, mumsy.
I think that’s the ideal position (and I would have loved to have had a mother like you – I’ve often thought that when I’ve seen comments you’ve written on Rachel’s posts!) Unfortunately in my case the situation is somewhat different – I didn’t have the happiest of childhoods (to say the least), I’m now in my thirties, and I also live on the other side of the world to my parents. They’re very unlikely to find my LJ in any case, but I sometimes write about issues from the past and it’s important to me to know that they’re not reading it. Particularly since my mother and I have been estranged for some years now.
Ah well!
you are somehow removing from the internet what it was invented to do
I say phooey!
On several counts.
The Internet was invented to allow the US government to continue communications through nuclear war (or other catastrophic happening). The WWW was invented to help particle physicists in geographically diverse locations communicate effectively. Whatever you choose to do or not do will have zero effect on those :-).
Being less pedantic and biting my tongue over other parts of that argument 🙂 if you choose to not add some of your thoughts to the collective pool of words in the web then you still aren’t removing anything! If they’re things that you won’t say in a public place but you will say in a semi-private place then you’re even less removing something.
In short…do what works for you. Yours is the only opinion that matters.
Especially don’t listen to my opinion! 🙂
How can I not listen to your opinion when you speak so much sense?!
It’s easy. Just try harder 🙂 🙂
And thus, as if to illustrate how I am comfortable writing for the whole world to see about one thing, but on other matters, my words are filtered to the highest degree…
…I notice that you haven’t commented on my previous post… 🙁
I think that’s bollocks, personally. One of the things the internet is for is self-expression. How that self-expression manifests itself is entirely up to the individual. I see no reason at all why *everything* should be public. In fact the internet would probably be rather better if people learned to keep some things to themselves!!