Sunday, November 30, 2008
How much are we willing to expose?
Before facebook, and before myspace the hit thing in my area was xanga. Xanga was basically an online journal. You could network and read what was going on in the lives of your friends or strangers. I have long since deleted my xanga, not because I don’t enjoy online journaling but because my brothers and family found it. I kept it private from them and even had the privacy setting but I had quite some fear they would figure out my insanely hard passwords and see everything I wrote. I had a myspace but really didn’t like the site. I still have myspace but I rarely update it. Facebook is the main source I use, however I am friends with my brothers on facebook so I worry what they may see. Because of this all family and friends of the family are on my limited profile. A site similar to xanga is livejournal. I had a few friends with an LJ and decided to create one because I missed venting my feelings. I had discovered I used xanga as a some what healthy way to vent out my anger and frustration instead of putting it on other people, of course I have it set very privately because I still fear my family finding it. I know there is nothing there that I need to actually hide from them, but I still feel the need to hide it. I make my thoughts public (though locked so only friends can see them), yet I worry about my privacy. It seems ironic I am willing to expose myself, but only to certain people.
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3 comments:
I remember when these sites were around and they were the popular thing to have. I thought and still think that they are a good idea and help people vent their feelings. I mean you still do need to be careful with what you do and say on these websites because it is dealing with other peoples feelings They were a trend and faded away just as I believe facebook and myspace will one day.
I feel the same way about being about to make aspects of my life public, but only to certain people. Recently, several family members have friended me on facebook and because of this I have set my profile to limited for them as well. Even simple things such as inside jokes a friend writes on wall are not always things I want my relatives to read about simply because they could take it in the wrong way.
I don't feel as if this is a strange phenomenon. In my experience everyone needs to do a little venting from time to time, if online journaling is the way you accomplish that that is perfectly fine. Privacy settings make it so only certain people can view the thoughts much the way a similar conversation would be with your friends, a 1 on 1 sharing of ideas.
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