To me, anything that's on my journal is something I'm deliberately releasing into the public. If it's just for me -- my dirty laundry, my musings, my moments of private I-know-I'm-being-stupid-but -- then I don't put it on my LJ. That's a public arena. By nature it is -- no matter what I might prefer to think of it, it's the equivalent of standing up in the middle of the town square and announcing my thoughts on something. Maybe I have a lot of friends or am posting on a public comm, and it's the crowded square at noontime; maybe I have two people friended and a couple more who wander by occasionally, and in this case the metaphor is more like announcing it to a square at midnight when there might be a couple of people in the shadows or there might not. But it's still a public space, and I'm announcing it where people can hear me.
If I don't want something public, I have a lot of options. I might private-lock it, or write it in a Wordpad file on my computer, or write it out and then delete it before hitting Post, or put it in a physical notebook, or just muse about it inside my head. But once I've hit that Post button, it's a public announcement, and if I take it back I need to communicate that I'm doing that. And I need to be aware that if I take it back by deleting the entire post, or replacing all the text with a [post deleted due to being a moment of stupidity] or whatever, people might get annoyed. Some of them will read it as an apology; others will read it as me trying to pretend that I never said anything like that, nope, not me, go on about your business everybody.
Or, alternately, I might lock it to a specific subset of my friendslist. In that case, it's a little hazier. Is that public? Or is it a private matter I'm letting a specifically trusted group of friends in on? It's hazy, as I say, but personally I tend to think that if I'm making a clear gesture that this is a private matter, it's accordingly less public, and more owned by me as the author specifically. If someone deleted or private-locked an entry I'd previously been privy to, but under a tight lock of some sort -- well, I might regret it if for whatever reason I wanted to reread (and I do memory particularly insightful or interesting posts to reread), but I wouldn't feel as if it was erasing something they didn't have a right to erase.
Obviously, others disagree; this entire post is about that. But for me, I think that a public post is a public announcement, and taking it down isn't like, say, clearing up my laundry and putting it away. It's more like hanging my laundry out in the front yard, and then later saying "Nope, I never do laundry! Well, okay, I might have once, but you can't prove it." So it's interesting to me to hear about different viewpoints on the matter, because I have this completely automatic assumption that it's a public sphere, no matter how one feels about the details of deletion or whatever.
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Date: 24 Feb 2011 06:14 pm (UTC)If I don't want something public, I have a lot of options. I might private-lock it, or write it in a Wordpad file on my computer, or write it out and then delete it before hitting Post, or put it in a physical notebook, or just muse about it inside my head. But once I've hit that Post button, it's a public announcement, and if I take it back I need to communicate that I'm doing that. And I need to be aware that if I take it back by deleting the entire post, or replacing all the text with a [post deleted due to being a moment of stupidity] or whatever, people might get annoyed. Some of them will read it as an apology; others will read it as me trying to pretend that I never said anything like that, nope, not me, go on about your business everybody.
Or, alternately, I might lock it to a specific subset of my friendslist. In that case, it's a little hazier. Is that public? Or is it a private matter I'm letting a specifically trusted group of friends in on? It's hazy, as I say, but personally I tend to think that if I'm making a clear gesture that this is a private matter, it's accordingly less public, and more owned by me as the author specifically. If someone deleted or private-locked an entry I'd previously been privy to, but under a tight lock of some sort -- well, I might regret it if for whatever reason I wanted to reread (and I do memory particularly insightful or interesting posts to reread), but I wouldn't feel as if it was erasing something they didn't have a right to erase.
Obviously, others disagree; this entire post is about that. But for me, I think that a public post is a public announcement, and taking it down isn't like, say, clearing up my laundry and putting it away. It's more like hanging my laundry out in the front yard, and then later saying "Nope, I never do laundry! Well, okay, I might have once, but you can't prove it." So it's interesting to me to hear about different viewpoints on the matter, because I have this completely automatic assumption that it's a public sphere, no matter how one feels about the details of deletion or whatever.