Allan Bishop and I engaged in a rather inter­est­ing short dis­cus­sion this morn­ing on blogs, pub­lic dis­course and what it means to share your thoughts in the inter­net era. He raised the story of the chap that went online and sud­denly dis­covered extens­ive dis­cus­sion amongst class­mates over his short­com­ings. Com­ment­ary was writ­ten with the assump­tion that the sub­ject of their dis­cus­sion would never actu­ally see the con­tent. I made the state­ment that when I throw stuff online I simply pre­sume that it is pub­lic, even if I do not inten­tion­ally make it so. Case in point…this blog site. Although it can be accessed and shows up in Google searches, I don’t actu­ally link to it from any­where. Only a couple people have been poin­ted to it at dif­fer­ent points. I am not delib­er­ately keep­ing it secret or hid­den, I just want to see if and how I actu­ally use it before decid­ing how I would inten­tion­ally share it. So it remains unlinked, but still find­able should someone make a delib­er­ate attempt to search for it.
But how much of this is actu­ally in my con­trol. Not as much I would sus­pect I or most people would think. There­fore I try to exer­cise some dis­cre­tion on what an how I write to the blog.
What about anonym­ous broad­sheets of the 17th and 18thCs? Although pub­lished under pseud­onyms, small circles were often aware of to whom each could be attrib­uted. So, is there any degree of anonym­ity today. Much less I would argue unless one takes great tech­nical pains to cover ones foot­steps. How­ever, sniff­ing out the bread­crumbs is also tied to how tech­nic­ally ept one is…so there are vary­ing degrees of anonym­ity and no uni­ver­sal applic­a­tion to a single indi­vidual. Not sure what all of this means, but it raised the ques­tion of author’s inten­tions. I per­ceived that a diary was much more private than a journal and Allan held the oppos­ite. I related a journal to a more busi­ness­like entry of daily trans­ac­tions and a diary to a more emo­tion­ally driven cri­tique of thoughts and feel­ing. The journal, Allan thought was more of this…and fur­ther, a gender issue arises. I had always felt that journ­als were some­thing that was in the male domain and a diary apply­ing more to the fem­in­ine. This too is some­thing of dis­cus­sion. Thoughts?