Online journals concern me greatly. I don't think there is anything *inherently* wrong with them. Someone who has an online journal is not necessary making grave mistakes with it. But I think that online journals are such that most natural way to use them is, in fact, very unwise.

This post is a collection of loosely connected musings on issues relating to the use of online journals. It's a large topic. Entire threads could be devoted to a number of these subtopics.

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NON-WORRISOME ONLINE JOURNAL PURPOSE

Updates and commentary concerning an organization, event, web site, etc. The Site Journal on RinkWorks falls into this category. This doesn't worry me because its chartered *purpose*, its reason for existence, is to dispense information meant to be dispensed. Note that this is a step *beyond* "nothing is posted that isn't supposed to be public." It's *purpose* is inherently public in nature.

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PRIVATE JOURNAL ENTRIES

I've read too many online journals (not something I do anymore) in which people discuss the most deeply personal things imaginable -- not just about oneself but about *others* as well -- and have this stuff open to the public, for anybody to see. The keep it "private" by only giving out the link to certain people, which is essentially no precaution at all. Google, archive.org, a slip of the tongue by anyone in the know, someone browsing your Internet history -- all these things can irrevocably break that "privacy" in a heartbeat.

Now, LiveJournal allows you to make private journal entries, so that nobody else can see them. Alternately, you can restrict the visibility of such entries to a few specific people. This is better than broadcasting private things in public entries, but I still do not believe this is a wise practice at all. By making a "private" journal entry, you are still (1) saving private information to someone else's computer, where it is doubtless backed up regularly; (2) trusting in the flawless operation of the journal software, which will not ever erroneously reveal this private information to the wrong people, to the public, to search engines, or to archive sites, regardless of the inevitable changes and revisions in software, server moves, company management policy changes, and more; (3) trusting in the employees of the company to honor your privacy by not only not saving and/or redistributing private information but not READING it either (which, IMHO, is an absurd sort of trust to have -- what are the odds NONE of the people who work for LiveJournal don't ever browse private journals on their lunchhour?); (4) trusting that the system won't be hacked into.

Now, granted, some information is not so desperately private that the above are not acceptable risks -- but that leads into the next section.


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MAKING WISE DECISIONS ABOUT CONTENT

Let's face it. Nobody is perfect. We all make mistakes. The thing about growing up and learning -- not just through childhood and adolescence but a bit beyond that as well -- is that you generally get to recover from mistakes. Few mistakes you make in childhood are permanent. You can learn lasting lessons, but the mistakes themselves mercifully fade away. In your late teens and early twenties, this starts to transition. You often still have your parents to fall back on if you really screw up, but you get to take steps toward stretching your own wings and flying or falling on your own. If you screw up, it causes problems, and if it's bad enough, those mistakes have lingering effects, but often things smooth over and move on.

The Internet is not like that. If you put something on the Internet, that decision has to be considered final by default. If you take something off quickly enough, you may get lucky, but in general you cannot ever take anything OFF the Internet. You can only put things ON it.

The Internet is the great equalizer. Celebrities, who pay for being in the public eye by being unable to make mistakes without them being plastered in newspapers across the globe, are permitted the opportunity to get online and be regular people. Children, on the other hand, are expected to meet standards of behavior and correctness that their maturity level is not ready for. For example, if you happen upon a web page with some random text by some random person, you might think, "This guy is an idiot," but actually it's a six year old who is thinking and writing on a twelve year old level. On the other hand, you could find a dissertation on some technical matter to be impressive, except that the author of THAT is Ph.D., and his article LOOKS impressive but is fundamentally unsound. In person, you would judge the six year old and the Ph.D. on more fair grounds.

So what am I leading up to? Basically, the Internet, being the great equalizer and all, does not permit children and adolescents the kind of forgiving atmosphere that they are mature enough to handle. Mistakes are permanent. If you make a mistake -- and remember, we are all imperfect and inevitably will -- you're hosed. What goes on the Internet does not come off. If you're a fourteen year old, and you post in your journal about a fight you had with your mother, or how your teacher is a moron, or how you have a crush on so-and-so, or how you live at 581 Westbridge Drive Apt. 2B, Indiana, that's it.

If you take something off right away, you're *probably* safe -- that is, unless the online journal company logs all updates -- but more often than not, mistakes made in revealing too much personal information are not discovered until a day later, or maybe a month, a year, three years, or ten years down the road.

I may lose a lot of you here, but, to be perfectly bluntly honest, I don't believe that anyone younger than around early/mid twenties (here I speak of some kind of weighted average between "physical age" and "maturity" -- maturity counts but cannot entirely obsolete the experience that comes in no other way than by the passing of years) is mature enough to know how to handle the responsibility of an online journal (UNLESS there is a specific chartered purpose for the journal, such as, "updates/commentary about an organization, event, web site, etc" -- this point of focus provides a formal direction that makes it harder to err). And, also bluntly, I think there is a shocking percentage of twentysomethings that aren't ready for the responsibility either.

Why do I think this? Basically, because you don't start to understand the value of privacy until you're at LEAST that age. (I'm 28, and I'm *still* in the process of understanding it.) Online journals, however, give people the opportunity to give away their privacy irrevocably, before they've had a chance to comprehend the value of what they're giving away.

Then there is a whole category of things that don't seem like breaches of privacy at the time but eventually become so. For example, you might talk about someone who would seem to be out of your life, but then, years down the road, that person is back in it, and suddenly it matters that that person not find and read that one journal entry you may have even forgotten you ever made. Hey, even if you delete that entry, even if you don't even have your online journal anymore -- if google or archive.org or something else found it, it'll be around forever, and a lot of manhours and money goes into the development of search engines to help people *find* things like obscure journal entries.

So when I think about how unforgiving mistakes are in the dispensation of information, and then I think about how a whole lot of people are using their online journals, it's a great concern to me. People use them as their emotional outlets. Vent about one thing, jubilate over another -- this is exactly the wrong way to handle an online journal. Feelings are fickle. If you rant about something that you cool off about later, sorry, your angry rant, along with everything you said that you didn't mean, has already been given out to the entire world. Moreover, feelings are about as personal as things get. If you tell someone how you feel, you essentially give that person power over you. It enables that person to help you but also to hurt you. It provides a personal connection for stalkers to become attached to. It provides cruel people with the knowledge of how to get to you. It provides *anybody* with the ability to pass that information on to others. You wouldn't walk up to a punk in the street and pour out one iota of your feelings, so why would you do that to potentially thousands of such people that you can't see?

Even if you're not effusive in your online journal entries, if you keep one regularly, eventually you're going to find a moment of loneliness, paranoia, anger, depression, or frustration that will tempt you to reveal too much in your online journal, and if you're not consciously guarding against it, not consciously appreciative of your privacy, and so forth, eventually you'll succumb to it.

One could argue that this very message forum presents the same dangers. It does. To a lesser extent, though, because the stated charter of this forum is not for YOU, the reader and participant of this forum, to use it to air your emotions or chronicle your daily activities. So there is not quite the natural inclination to use it inappropriately. But this forum has *frequently* been used to dispense private information that should not be dispensed. I have erred in this manner myself.

I've been on the Internet since I was 17. There are things on the Internet that I wish were not. And I didn't even HAVE an online journal, whose *purpose* lent itself to airing private information. So I look around today at the sheer number of people out there who are less restrained than I was, and I simply cannot imagine the amount of embarrassment and regret and perhaps other things they will experience in five or ten years.

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UNDERSTANDING YOUR AUDIENCE

Part, but not all, of making wise decisions about what information you broadcast *depends* on understanding who can access your information. What I'm about to say probably doesn't really seem real to those who don't *already* understand this, because it isn't usually until you've clocked a good number of years in the "real world" that it sinks in that there ARE a lot of different kinds of people in the world.

Basically, when you post something on the Internet for the public to view, you have to assume that among the people that will be reading your text are rapists, child molesters, gang members, terrorists, legal prosecutors, the IRS, future potential employers, and everybody from all social circles in your life: your family, your classmates/teachers, your boss/co-workers, your church, etc.

Recently I encountered the owner of a public LiveJournal page who instructed his/her friends not to give a certain person the URL to his/her journal. This boggles my mind. If you have a problem with ANY ONE PERSON reading your public online journal, you don't understand what you're dealing with. Because, guaranteed, there are THOUSANDS, perhaps MILLIONS, and possibly BILLIONS of people in the world that you'd LESS want to see your page than whoever you're thinking of, and every last one of them has free access to your page. You don't even get to know *who* reads your page.

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DYSFUNCTIONAL SOCIALIZING

Taking a break from the privacy issue, here's another thing. This addresses the issue of people using online journals as a means of recounting stories or information to groups of friends, so that the telling of stories does not need to be repeated, and no one will be accidentally left out of the loop.

Again, this is fine if the information is stuff like coordinating events or organizations, but if we're talking about personal events that have personal meaning, and the journal is used to convey this information to friends, then there's a huge problem here. Maryam summed it up nicely in her post:

"...if the reason is for keeping in touch with all your friends, it just seems like a mass-produced, impersonal conversation to me. It may take longer, but to me, this shouldn't be something we take shortcuts on. I also find it... well, not offensive, but something not so strong as that...that other people would expect me to read their journals to know what is happening with them...."

Exactly so. The building and maintaining of friendships is only minorly about the transfer of personal information. Much more of it is about the *act* of sharing personal information. If I expounded in a journal about how terrible I feel because such-and-such happened to me, and my friends read that, well, even if I got lots of supportive feedback, that's a really dysfunctional way for friendships to work. It's a lot healthier for one person to sit down with another and RIGHT THEN voice your feelings and troubles. The connection you build with someone while in the ACT of doing this is a large part of what grounds friendships and makes them grow. Even if there is not a great source of distress but just some happy little nothings you are moved to share with your friends, STILL the core part of maintaining those friendships is in the act of sharing them directly with someone, not in broadcasting it to whichever particular friends think to read your journal.

Internet friendships are dysfunctional enough. People just aren't built to be so close to others, on a day-to-day basis, that they can never see, hear, or touch. But often it can't be helped. All the Rinkies here have friendships online, and the only way to commune with them is to communicate online (or write snail mail or talk on the phone, which have mostly the same issues; the phone is one step in the right direction, but only one), and so we make do with a broken means of communion that the human spirit was never built for. But it is extremely unwise, I think, to break this more than is necessary by removing, in ADDITION to the ability to see, hear, and touch, the connection made between friends when they converse interactively together.

A related issue: if you go the route of using journals to communicate with your friends, you're possibly unwittingly making decisions about who your friends are. Maryam and I make two people you're probably not going to be very close to if you rely exclusively on a journal to share information. I don't read people's journals for the same reason Maryam does not. I don't derive any use out of it. I don't *refuse* to read journals. If a link was given to me and someone said it had something interesting on it, I might go see, but I most definitely do not take the initiative to go find out what's going on in someone else's life, even if it's someone that I respect and love. Why would I? Idle curiosity or boredom are the only reasons I can think of, but I'm never that idly curious or bored, and in any case it does not build my friendship with the author of the journal. I don't even read the journals of those couple people I'm *closest* to. My point is that if you centralize your communication with your friends in your journal, you leave some people out of the loop that you may not mean to. It's better to choose friends based on trust, understanding, and compatibility of personality, rather than willingness to read journals.

Come to think of it...well, I don't know if this is a coincidence or not, but if I think about the various Rinkies that have LiveJournals and seem to regularly keep tabs on each other's, I'd say about 8 or 9 of the 10ish names I come up with are those same Rinkies I've been interested in being closer friends with than I am. Whether those people feel the same way about me, I don't know. It's ok if not. And I'm not really suggesting that online journals is the *reason* I'm not closer. I'm not even suggesting that if it IS a reason, that it's a BAD reason. But I wonder if there is a connection of some sort here.

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SO ARE ONLINE JOURNALS ALL EVIL?

Nah. The exception about coordinating events, providing updates about web sites, etc., is one very good and productive use.

Another, although I can think of better ways to do this, is to use a journal as a means of publishing a running written work. "I Think" is something that could work in a journal format. On the other side of that coin might be a series of *serious* thoughtful dissertations or commentary, whether on the state of world politics, the movie business, or whatever. Online journals are probably also good formats for travelogues, where daily updates of someone's experiences abroad are posted.

And here's another use: nothing wrong with using it as a toy. Journals can be used as lazy people's home pages -- random collections of (usually) crap that people write and post to amuse themselves. Hey, RinkWorks is essentially one of those, just a whole lot bigger than the usual. I can see how someone who would want to dabble in that kind of thing but lacks the skill or interest in creating an actual web site might find an online journal the way to go.

So long as people are responsible about what information they transmit, what's the harm in playing? And, hey, LiveJournal has mood icons. I personally find the intended use of "mood icons" to be laughably lame, but as something to play with, they're pretty cool. Icons are fun.

And I'm sure that there are other uses of online journals that are either good or neutral. However, I don't think I've personally seen any in the "good" category and only a minority that I'm not at *least* uneasy about.

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WHAT'S A GOOD WAY TO KEEP A JOURNAL, THEN?

In a diary, where such things were meant to be kept. That's where you put the little rants and jubilations of the moment. That's where you talk about how Mrs. Sanders is a moron and you have a crush on Ashley Gardner. That's where you get to take off your masks and let your emotional guard down. Assuming, of course, you don't have a nosy little sister that might someday find your diary, read it, and tease you mercilessly about it. But, hey, if your nosy little sister finds it, that's still a lot better than your next employer, the stalker down the road, AND Ashley Gardner finding it. And you have the option of burning the thing to ashes at any time, obliterating it from the world forever, too.