Double Exposure
Jul. 10th, 2002 10:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beetigerMy mother-in-law is an academic whose specialty is autobiography. I'm not quite sure how it came up - something about what kinds of World Tree things Bard and I are doing these days, and his fictional journal for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sythry - but we ended up talking to her about the LiveJournal phenomenon. She was very intrigued by the idea of people putting extremely personal journals on public display, for feedback and review, for an unknown, but potentially unlimited audience. She was astounded to hear that even just on one of the major services, there are 500,000 accounts. She thought she might need to somehow include something about this in her class curricula.
It wasn't long into this discussion that we realized we'd have to show it to her. This was going to be tricky, as we're fairly "don't ask, don't tell" about much of our life with that chunk of family. Also, I'm sometimes a bit intimidated about showing my writing around to a family of writers. So I didn't log in, and instead just used the 'random' button to pull out a sampling of journals. She was very unimpressed and slightly appalled. The overall feeling of the journals was one of adolescent vanity. The comments were not, generally, insightful, or spelled correctly. I guess she'd thought that journals for public consumption might be built to reflect their publicness in style, if not in discretion about content, and that people who really couldn't write just wouldn't bother doing this. I suggested that we use some keywords to pull a better selection. "Writing" pulled nothing more interesting. "Nonfiction" and "essays" brought only a slightly better group. "Parenting" brought a different group of very mundane writing, mostly moms at home without enough outside stimulation. In order to actually give her a sense of what was going on, I'd have to show her something I knew.
I showed herchipotle's journal first, thenpostvixen. She smiled . "Okay. These people at least have a sense of audience." She asked me what my name was there, and I hedged by showing her sythry's journal, as if that were somehow a team project, though it's not. I didn't show her the "friends" function. I think I'm safe, though if she does decide to chase down my journal, she's certainly the type to ask about all of the details. She thinks people spontaneously tell her their life stories, but really, she's a master interrogator.
****
There's a certain subset of my friends, some of the ones with whom I spend time in Real Life (TM), with whom I'm cyclically frustrated. I'm pretty sure we're all freaks of various sorts. I'm pretty sure we've all had similar experiences we're not talking about, because each of us thinks the others won't understand. I've started trying to talk more frankly with some of them, testing the waters, but no one's taking my bait.
****
Yesterday a friend-of-a-friend sent me a personal essay of zirs, which zie intends to try to get published. It includes several descriptions of events in which I was involved, so zie's written about me. Zie, I suppose kindly, has given me a pseudonym. Zie picked Melissa, which tickled me quite a bit because it means "honeybee", though zie didn't know that. I laughed, though, that zie'd bothered. The piece also describes me as a female person who's written a D&D-like game for the furry community, as a small thirtyish woman with long brown hair, as married to a person who is sometimes nongendered, and as having a persona of a great cat who is queen of a hive of bees. There are quite a few people who could trace me down with that information who probably don't even *know* my first name. I'm not Rumplestiltskin; and if I've a True Name that gives you power over me, it's certainly not Vicki.
But I don't mind, really. I generally work under the assumption that everything that can be known about me, factually, is public information, but that nevertheless discretion is still often a good idea.
sythry - but we ended up talking to her about the LiveJournal phenomenon. She was very intrigued by the idea of people putting extremely personal journals on public display, for feedback and review, for an unknown, but potentially unlimited audience. She was astounded to hear that even just on one of the major services, there are 500,000 accounts. She thought she might need to somehow include something about this in her class curricula.It wasn't long into this discussion that we realized we'd have to show it to her. This was going to be tricky, as we're fairly "don't ask, don't tell" about much of our life with that chunk of family. Also, I'm sometimes a bit intimidated about showing my writing around to a family of writers. So I didn't log in, and instead just used the 'random' button to pull out a sampling of journals. She was very unimpressed and slightly appalled. The overall feeling of the journals was one of adolescent vanity. The comments were not, generally, insightful, or spelled correctly. I guess she'd thought that journals for public consumption might be built to reflect their publicness in style, if not in discretion about content, and that people who really couldn't write just wouldn't bother doing this. I suggested that we use some keywords to pull a better selection. "Writing" pulled nothing more interesting. "Nonfiction" and "essays" brought only a slightly better group. "Parenting" brought a different group of very mundane writing, mostly moms at home without enough outside stimulation. In order to actually give her a sense of what was going on, I'd have to show her something I knew.
I showed her
chipotle's journal first, thenpostvixen. She smiled . "Okay. These people at least have a sense of audience." She asked me what my name was there, and I hedged by showing her sythry's journal, as if that were somehow a team project, though it's not. I didn't show her the "friends" function. I think I'm safe, though if she does decide to chase down my journal, she's certainly the type to ask about all of the details. She thinks people spontaneously tell her their life stories, but really, she's a master interrogator.****
There's a certain subset of my friends, some of the ones with whom I spend time in Real Life (TM), with whom I'm cyclically frustrated. I'm pretty sure we're all freaks of various sorts. I'm pretty sure we've all had similar experiences we're not talking about, because each of us thinks the others won't understand. I've started trying to talk more frankly with some of them, testing the waters, but no one's taking my bait.
****
Yesterday a friend-of-a-friend sent me a personal essay of zirs, which zie intends to try to get published. It includes several descriptions of events in which I was involved, so zie's written about me. Zie, I suppose kindly, has given me a pseudonym. Zie picked Melissa, which tickled me quite a bit because it means "honeybee", though zie didn't know that. I laughed, though, that zie'd bothered. The piece also describes me as a female person who's written a D&D-like game for the furry community, as a small thirtyish woman with long brown hair, as married to a person who is sometimes nongendered, and as having a persona of a great cat who is queen of a hive of bees. There are quite a few people who could trace me down with that information who probably don't even *know* my first name. I'm not Rumplestiltskin; and if I've a True Name that gives you power over me, it's certainly not Vicki.
But I don't mind, really. I generally work under the assumption that everything that can be known about me, factually, is public information, but that nevertheless discretion is still often a good idea.
Zeroed
Date: 2002-07-10 10:35 am (UTC)I've removed my real name from everything but NG and ML archives, which I can't. My new first real name (which rhymes with Cannapaula) will not appear anywhere, because it's unique; nobody exists with that name. Without that link I should be very difficult to trace, and impossible to find on a simple search.
I found it necessary to divorce my RL name from my VR activities after receiving threats on my career from total strangers who could indeed ruin my career if motivated to. This is a problem with an information era, and is yet another reason I'd dream of being in the arts if such a career were viable.
My VR activities are far too public, and I like it that way. I like being open about my tastes and opinions...but these are things that would get me lynched in most parts of this nation. I'm a dogdamned dissident.
Trickster