Hi Glenn.
Anyone else hiding in the woodworks, or would you rather just share reading this over a meeting some day, too? Apparently I splutter and turn red – given how many people have taken to just casually mentioning it offhand, I figure it must be highly entertaining to see. (Ahem. Lizzy.)
It’s actually a really weird flip of the MySpace thing I was mentioning a few weeks ago, not that I’m a name anyone should (or does) know, but of how it must be to write knowing people do occasionally peek. Although I’ve been writing in a bloglike setting for five years now, a lot longer if you include things that aren’t archived here (or if I’m lucky, anywhere), the vast majority of that it’s been writing for an audience of few. Myself and a couple of close friends, at the very most.
I find myself stopping now, and thinking about what I say. Which is as it should be; you should always be aware that what you’re placing online can be found by anyone. But there is a tangible difference between knowing the potential, and the actual. (Or is that the virtual and actual, in ontological quadrivium terms? Or since that damned Husserl test is Friday, would the knowing of potential be the transcendent essence and the actual experience the epistemic?)
As I was telling Sean after he played the splutter’n’blush game, the cognitive awareness of self, not as singular but in relation to others, is a very interesting experience.
I bet some of a certain forum is google cached….
Yeeeeah.
That, thankfully, does not count as a blog. Nor is it common sense who I am…was…there.
God I don’t miss that place at all. The friends I have from it, I treasure immensely… put the headaches never made it worthwhile.
Since my blog is easy to find (and even linked from my e-mail signature, indirectly) I assume that everyone, from family to old acquaintances to professors, is likely to find it, and I compose my entries based on that assumption. There’s no other way to do it unless one wants to be very unpleasantly surprised. The only things I assume are only seen by close friends are…the things that I secure so that they’re only seen by close friends.
I agree – have never really disagreed. What I do find surprising is finding people who’re the same level of nosy I am, who have mad google skills, or who just read what I write on their blogs and click-thru to read mine, in return. It suggests a level of interest I’m not accustomed to having pointed my way.
I simply do not assume anything that goes online stays private, be it email, instant message, LJ or blog posts.
But it’s a very different experience to be aware of potential, and to have the actual experience.