Blogging as conversation?

[owlectomy]

I'm reading Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody," which deals with how social software is reducing transaction costs and making things possible that weren't possible before (Wikipedia, for example - or finding photos by GPS tag.) It's a decent book so far, but what's interesting to me is that he gets right, in a way almost no one does, the privateness of livejournal posts. How often have I seen livejournal slapfights where someone says, "If you make a public post you're opening yourself up for criticism and you shouldn't whine about it"? And it is true that if you make a public post you're opening yourself up for criticism, but I still can't help but feel igry* when a crowd piles on to a post that would normally have been read by less than a dozen people.

Shirky says that livejournal posts are more like having a conversation in a mall food court than publishing a newspaper. Even though it's taking place in public, even though you acknowledge that anyone can hear what you're saying, you have some expectation of privacy; it's against the social rules for a complete stranger to walk up to you and start criticizing the life choices that you are discussing within the conversation. And no one expects you to move the conversation to a private room in order to avoid criticism! (Furthermore, Shirky says, this is why all the snark about LJ posts that are just about what you had for lunch or what you did that weekend is beside the point. These posts aren't a failure of blogging, or a failure of the poster to think of something interesting to say; they're just an instance of blogging-as-conversation rather than blogging-as-publication.)

I guess that's where I get the sense that, while it's fine to comment on a stranger's post if not just to start a fight, it's polite to say "Hello, I just wandered in from a friend's friendslist..." -- which I would not consider necessary if I were to comment at one of the bigger blogs!

*Half a dozen years ago someone coined the word 'igry' to describe being embarrassed for someone else when they make a social faux pas. It failed to catch on, but I continue to find it useful.

Comments

[owldaughter.livejournal.com]

Yes, that. Because of the nature of LJ and blogs in general, it can quickly spider from a post read by a few people into something very linked-to. The conversation vs. publication thing is a very good point. And I feel as you do, that it's not polite to throw yourself into someone else's conversation without at least introducing yourself and saying how you got there. People haven't quite gotten the courtesy over the Web thing yet; they figure if you can read it, you're entitled to yell about it.

Might look that book up. Hmm.

[lordameth.livejournal.com]

Excellent metaphor, LJ as mall food court.

.. I have also found that all too often closing my posts to "Friends Only" does little to avoid harsh criticism.

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

My friends are my friends because I trust them to understand the particular circumstances under which I make questionable decisions, to give me slack when I rush off a particularly hasty generalization without taking enough time to shade in the nuances, and also to call me on it when I screw up.

Of course there's a difference between real friends and livejournal friends.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Lovely analogy. This is my quarrel with metafandom and its policy of 'anything not forbidden is allowed.' They link entries to a community of thousands unless you say in the post or your profile that they may not. Some people only discover the existence of metafandom when a horde of outrgaed strangers comes and comments in their lj.

May I quote the second paragraph in my own lj? I won't link unless you say it's OK to.

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

Certainly you may.

[ozarque.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed Here Comes Everybody very much, and have been recommending it to people.

[littlebutfierce]

I would actually disagree w/the LJ post as food court convo analogy--b/c food court convos are generally gone as soon as you're done w/them; they're not archived online like LJ posts are (barring, of course, later friends-locking of the post, or, hey, LJ going down)... they don't pop up in search engines (if you check off in your profile that you don't want spiders crawling--tho' that doesn't always work), etc. etc.

Realistic expectations of privacy connected to anything publicly posted on the internet seem a little... naive... to me. (I mean, if nothing else, LJ has that random journal feature, right?)

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

Hmm, that's a good point about the time persistence of Livejournal posts.

I am definitely not going to be naive about the possibility (and inevitability) of people finding what I write online (and I certainly friends-lock Patron Horror Stories and anything that's too gossippy). But I feel like, even though "anything you publish on the internet is automatically open to criticism from anyone anywhere" is the rule as a practical matter... in a social context, for me, I don't feel like it works that way.

(Oh, I should mention, since I dashed that post off really quickly before work, it's not like all LJs are in the same category. There are enough big famous LJs where comment threads frequently go over 100, and clearly those don't act like semi-private conversations.)