I Cross The Line

[koganbot]

Conversation on Saturday afternoon:

Me: The Rolling Stones' Got Live If You Want It is way way better than Get Your Ya-Yas Out.

Derek Krissoff (UGA Press editor whom I was now meeting in person for the first time): This morning I vowed to myself not to get into an argument with you about music, but you have NOW GONE TOO FAR!

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Hi Frank,

Derek here. I'm thinking of writing an article about the cultural history of privacy from roughly Roe / Watergate to Facebook. Working thesis leans heavily on AIDS -- private acts become dangerous or otherwise problematic, and exhibitionism kicks in as some sort of compensation.

You're a smart guy and famous online personality; what do you think?

Still listen to the comp you gave me last year. Thanks for that.

[koganbot]

Sounds like a very good idea for a book - esp. the AIDS focus. My guess also is that, since you're thinking of writing a book on the subject, you already know way more about it than I do. I'm not nearly as famous as I ought to be, and I assume everything I write online is available to anyone who wants to see it, so is more than equivalent to being public, but that very few people even look. Most of what has been published in print is hard to find, whereas what keeps my online stuff unknown is that the Web is swamped in writing, and mine is not a frequent destination.

Some of my livejournal friends use their friends-only setting a lot, whereas I don't; I'm not really going to worry too hard about whom I friend, therefore; my main reason for not going and getting more lj friends is that I already don't have time to read more than a fraction of what's on my friends page. I have no clue how secure friends-only pages are from prying eyes, but of course someone who is listed as a friend has access to whatever is written friends-only and can repeat it in public. I'm more concerned with someone impersonating me (as a couple of those ilX scum did last year).

What's amazing is that some of the kids on MySpace, for instance, really don't quite seem to comprehend that anyone in the world can look at what they write there unless they specifically make their MySpace friends-only. You have people berating friends, accusing boyfriends of giving blowjobs to best friends, bragging about drug use, threatening suicide, etc.

Another thing that many people don't realize is that email is not a sealed envelope. Presumably antispam and antivirus software searches everything I send by email for signs that it's spam or a virus. But in general I assume that no prying eyes are going to be actually reading my email, since who would have the time or the motive to get the access to do so? But then, I don't know what bots are out there doing broad searches or what they're looking for or how successfully they do it.

Anyhow, of my lj friends, freakytigger is the one likely to know something on this subject, though he'd be more likely to talk about it on his Blackbeard Blog than on lj.

I happened to run into a good conversation on online privacy and fraternization today on Danah Boyd's apophenia blog, regarding when teachers and students connect outside school (e.g. online).

We had a discussion on my own lj last month about pseudonymity online, and the supposed imperative that we're all supposed to feel maintain each other's pseudonyms no matter what (an imperative I seem not to feel to a great degree at all; whether I'd break someone's pseudonymity very much varies from circumstance to circumstance, of course, but in the online circles I frequent - which aren't heavy into fanfic and stuff - pseudonyms are used for expressivity not anonymity).