Esk

OK, let’s start over. Let’s make this a place to discuss this calmly. If you’d like an argument, or a discussion, please comment below, especially if you feel you don’t fit into one of these groups, or if you’d like to tell the world your reasons for blogging or for having a friends only livejournal or equivalent. This time around I’ll try to listen.

Here are some points against Friends-only blogging (not just as opposed to open blogging, but as opposed to not blogging or alternate means of communication.)

Anti-Stranger
Some people go flock (friends-lock) because they are afraid of random strangers reading their journals. Apparently they trust the random strangers who work and volunteer for livejournal (or other similar system) to keep their posts secret though. I can’t see why. Get your own blogging system or get an anonymous blog (don’t put your name or address in it), it’s much safer. Some of the points below also cover this category.

Anti-Authority
Some people are afraid for their future careers. This makes sense if you are (for instance) going to be a childrens’ teacher, and you have a drug ridden or paedophile past. I understand this reasoning entirely, but I think a little foresight might have helped in not putting such details online in the first place, or by anonymising them, or by removing then from the internet entirely once the decision was made for them not to be public. Friends only is not so secure that the police couldn’t get access if they wanted, and I suspect if you are identifiable such a thing could be used as evidence in court. I advocate anonymous blogging, or no blogging, over friends-only blogging for the “anti authorities” reasoning.

Anti-Specific-Person
Ok, so for the uninitiated non-tech, Friends-only must look like the ideal solution. I don’t trust it. That’s a personal paranoia, but I’d rather trust webspace I pay for and control hosting of. I’d rather have a wordpress account and make everyone log in to it, on my own webspace. Or, again the anonymous blogging solution. Making your blog identifiable means you are responsible for everything you say to everyone that reads it, whether you wanted them to or not. Any of the people on that friends list may allow others who aren’t to look over their shoulder, or reiterate parts verbally, or hint or imply that something has been said. They may not even realise that this is a breach of trust. They may not know why you are friends only in the first place.

Past Erasure
You’ve already said some controversial stuff, and you no longer want it public.
That’s a lot like publishing a book saying that you don’t believe in the holocaust, and then asking for all the copies back because you’ve changed your mind. Don’t publish things you’ll later regret. It is usually too late if you later realise that you don’t want your words out there, too many people will have already consumed that data, google included.

However, with your now 20-20 hindsight, if you really want to wipe your world-wide internet history, making your journal friends-only goes no distance towards doing that. What you have said is already out there. You need to not only protect what you are going to say, but erase what you have already said. Leaving it online in any form is not conducive to you cause, why do it? This category are often “anti authority” in disguise. I don’t know of any foolproof solutions to removing such data from the internet, but a few bucks archive.org’s way wouldn’t go amiss.

Pro-Friends
IMHO this is actually a rare category, despite the name. This category contains people who really do want to express their thoughts solely to their friends, and is about who they DO want to tell, rather than who they DON’T. This is probably the intended purpose of the option in LJ. This means that it’s not that you’re hiding stuff from the rest of the world, it’s just that ther rest of the world wouldn’t understand, this is about you and your group of friends, full stop. That’s all fine, until you start adding more and more people with less and less ties to you, onto your friend list. Soon people who’ve never met each other are on the same list and that’s no longer a friendship group, it’s a friendship chain. People who are all on your friends group fight over whether they should be on each others’. It’s cliquey, and causes arguments. If you really are making it friends only just to label a group of friends, make an LJ community or equivalent. If you’ve no fear of strangers reading it, why not let them?

What is a Blog?
I guess my main gripe with a friends only livejournal is that is isn’t a blog. Look up definitions of blog, or weblog, or web log, and you’ll see that most include the phrase “online publication” and often “discussion forum”. There is no such thing as a friends-only blog, just as there is no such thing as a private television programme. The whole point of a blog is to publicise your views to the world. If you want something else out of it, I’d suggest the telephone, or in person, as people are much more likely to interpret what you have said as what you meant. I blog partly as a reminder to myself what I’ve done, as a timecapsule to my future self about what I thought now, to my friends and relatives to let them know I’m still alive, and to the world at large because I want to be in control of that first google result for me. I want that result to be my own heartfelt thoughts, and my spin on events, before they get to anyone else’s opinion on me. I also think I have a few things to tell the world. That’s probably egotism, but I’m ok with that. I’d rather it wasn’t that review of a vibrator I gave, but I gave that to public forum just like everything else I type into a web-form.

Personally, I have nothing at all that I would want only my friends to know. That’s not to say I don’t have secrets, but those are either between Me myself and I, or me and Dan, and go no further. Everything else I do is absolutely public. If I did have anything I wanted to say to just my friends, I expect I’d tell them individually. Edit: actually probably I’d say something on an irc channel.

To Alec & Suz: I don’t think you’ve chosen the best solutions to your respective problems, but I do agree that you needed to do something, I just don’t think it goes far enough.

To Andy: You already have a public forum and your LJ isn’t a blog, therefore I pretty much agree with everything you’ve said. Spot on. Thanks for listening when I didn’t.