> 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.

Before I get into responding to selected points below, I'd like to say what an extremely thought-provoking post this was. You've put into words many of the reasons I feel unsettled by online journals; some of these I never realised before reading your post, but once somebody with a more analytical mind has mentioned them, I think "Oh! Yes, that's why I feel that way." Thank you for that.

> 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.

Personally, this has always been a frightening aspect of online socialising for me. I don't like having my words saved on quote pages or chat archives. Seeing them always gives me a feeling of wrongness. My online experience goes back about three years now, virtually all of it being here at Rinkworks. There's no way that's enough time to overcome the feeling -- no, the absolute ingrained knowledge -- that words once spoken are gone a second later.

Offline, where that rule still applies, a person is free to change. Over time, people can grow and change their opinions, their stated feelings or deeply held beliefs, and even their entire personality in some cases. Offline, you can *do* that, because the people you associate with see it as a gradual change. They see the reasons behind it, sometimes, or they don't notice the change at all, because their memories and their own perceptions are altering all the time, the same as yours.

Online, the person you appear to be in your writings is still exactly that same person five or ten years later, to anybody reading that writing. I think about a particular very strong belief I had when I was 15: I now hold the directly opposite belief equally strongly. I don't think changing one's beliefs is a good or bad thing; it's a natural outcome of one's own experiences, growing up, seeing things differently as you become a slightly different person. But imagine if I'd had internet access at that time. Everything I had to say about that topic -- and knowing the way I was at 15, I would have had a *lot* to say about it online -- would still be out there, and anybody could look that up and read it. And that's the person I would *be*, to that reader.

You might say it doesn't matter how somebody who doesn't know me perceives me, or how far their perception is from the truth. Personally, though, I consider the truth to be vitally important. Recording one's personality online is, in a very strange and new way, an involuntary act of deception by your present self against your future self.

All right, so this is getting into the realm of brain-melting philosophical debate, but it's something which I find more than a little disturbing. Is it a reason not to reveal any aspect of your personality online? No. Is it a reason to *think* about what you're revealing? Yes.

Tangent 2: There's always a balance. The *advantage* of this new permanence of words is that it has also made me think more about the (potential) permanence of words offline. When we make a statement to another person in spoken conversation, it *is*, in a way, archived. It might even be retained in that person's memory for the rest of their life. They might pass it on to others, perhaps *thousands* of others, both directly and indirectly. If not the actual words spoken, then the effect it had on them; their perception of you, and their perception of the world, is always affected in some way by each interaction. Online and offline, it's a good idea to realise this -- for the benefit of yourself and others.

> 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.

This is a very, very good point. And I think it's the best scenario I've *ever* heard for deciding whether or not a particular thing should be put online. If you'd absolutely die if a particular person ever saw it, yep, it shouldn't be online.

> 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.
>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.

Right. Another thing -- I couldn't use an online journal for this purpose, because I *couldn't* describe the same feeling or situation to more than one person, without changing the way I describe it. Depending who I'm talking to online, I would describe the exact same weekend in a completely different way each time. I'd never be lying or concealing anything, but just interacting differently with different people. It isn't anything to do with levels of intimacy: of my closest friends here, I would still describe the same event slightly differently to each of them if we were talking about it privately.

Brunnen-"the only way I can handle this forum and chat is by pretending my old posts don't exist"G