The Many Faces of LiveJournal
Of the myriad Web 2.0 sites and services out there, most seem to have a distinct purpose for their existence. Facebook connects friends and classmates, Yahoo! Groups lets people with similar interests chat amongst themselves, WordPress lets even an Internet newbie start up a blog. LiveJournal isn’t so simple. What is the function of LiveJournal? Well, judging by the name, it is a journal, a place to share personal thoughts and experiences. Only that’s not all there is to it. LJ used to invite newcomers to “Start a blog!”; LJ is used, by many, as simply another blogging platform along the lines of WordPress. Others use it as a social networking service, and LJ’s expansion of features in the past few years–enhanced messaging systems, “nudges,” virtual gifts–reflect that. Now, LJ acknowledges its complexity right on the front page: “You can use LiveJournal in many ways: a private journal, a blog, a discussion forum or a social network.”
Within fandom, still more LJ subscribers use the service as a fiction archive. One of the reasons that the Strikethrough incident hit fandom so hard was because entire large fandoms are almost entirely concentrated on LJ, having no privately managed fiction archives of their own.
So LJ is a confusing entity: part journal, part blog, part social networking service, and part archive. So where am I going with all this?
This blog exists, in part, because of the complexity of LiveJournal’s uses. When I acquired my LJ account back in March 2005, I used it as a journal. This was logical; it would be close to four months yet before I made my first LJ “friend.” I occasionally posted story notes and canon research, mostly for my own benefit, and when I decided to share my novel Another Man’s Cage with the world, LJ seemed the safest place to do it: I was nervous about sharing my writing, so the level of control LJ afforded was appealing. I could control the comments and delete the whole thing if it proved to be a mistake.
Lo and behold, people liked my writing, so my LJ became a mixture of personal journal and story archive. Not long after, I discovered the joys of “meta,” writing about the broader social and cultural entity that is fandom. My stories and my meta spurred a lot of debate and, in my first years in fandom, this was an immense source of pride for me. I loved that so many of my LJ friends met new friends through my journal; I loved the level of discussion and debate that could be counted upon from my friends list. Many of my views on fandom were shaped–or changed entirely–by discussions held on my LJ.
The problem arose when people started bringing the same level of critique to the more personal journal posts that I still made. Over the space of a few months, I had five people become critical and negative about a journal post I’d made that I regarded as deeply personal and not subject to debate. Most of these people were close friends whom I’d known for years. Suddenly, posting to my LJ wasn’t as much fun. Even a frivolous vacation post, it seemed, had to be considered as deeply as some of the meta that I’d posted after taking weeks to write and revise it. I never knew when a comment I made on a personal experience would touch someone the wrong way and spark a controversy, and I honestly didn’t possess the strength on most days to deal with this in my personal life.
For many months, I barely posted to LJ. And I was angry: angry that people I’d counted as friends took it upon themselves to critique everything from my personal appearance to my religious views. Then I realized that I was angry with the wrong people.
My LJ experience was my fault, not theirs.
Once I realized this, the paralysis lifted a bit. My LJ went back to being a journal. I started this blog for the meta side of things and built a website for my stories. I was up front with my LJ friends list about the change and the reason for it, and people understood. But I still felt as though the problem was largely limited to me. Other people didn’t seem to have trouble switching between LJ’s various hats.
Lo and behold, recently on Metafandom, there is proof that I’m not alone. Cupidsbow write A Personal Schema for Meta, which–despite the daunting title–is actually an analysis of the bounds between public and private in LJ and how commenters do and should respond to each.
Public and private: to someone even passingly familiar with LJ, this is probably a no-brainer. There are four levels of security on LJ: public, private, and two types of friends-lock. Normal friends-lock allows only users you’ve chosen to list as a friend to view the post. A second type of friends-lock allows you to control who sees the post more narrowly than that, granting permission on an individual basis from your list of friends. Friends-locked posts are clearly marked as such both to the user and to viewers. So public versus private should be simple, right?
It would be, except for the fact that, as I noted earlier, the uses of LJ are infinitely complex. “Public” and “private” aren’t easily delineated. LiveJournal–in its name, its mission, and its history–carries with it the connotation of a personal safe space, a private journal. What many users would consider fair game on a blog they consider off-limits on their LJ, even if the post is question is technically “public.”
A few weeks ago, again on Metafandom,aryas_zehral wrote a post about discovering her LiveJournal had been mined for quotes used in a book and her uncertain feelings toward this. My initial response to the post was to become slightly irritated: The content in question was publicly available, so what gave her the impression that it was off-limits? So long as the author was within the bounds of fair use, what differed her LJ from any other public source?
But, as I think more about it, the experiences of aryas_zehral and Cupidsbow only highlight the complexity that is LiveJournal: Both assumed that a particular post–though public–was going to be understood by its audience as being somehow more personal than an ordinary blog post and that the audience would treat it accordingly. This is the exact same problem that I had on LJ. I assumed that my readers would simply know that a post, though public and able to be read by anyone, was somehow off-limits to the usual level of discussion and debate that I welcomed on my journal.
What’s the answer to all this? There is none, at least none that I have. Netiquette is inherently complex to start: It is a mode of human communication that strips us of our main perceptive faculties in communication–our faces, our voices–and expects us to still behave like humans. Yet, in most online environments, we still have the context in which we’re communicating to help us figure out what is proper and improper behavior. I would approach the same subject very differently on a Yahoo! group, an online classroom, and this blog. Most web environments come with a clear understanding of who can see what is being written, who controls it, and what is and is not acceptable, all of which are often formally spelled out in Terms of Service and site policies. With LJ, though, this is less clear. Each user makes LJ his or her own space, bound by his or her own rules. Look at a handful of LJ user profiles: Many users define their rules for everything from comments to friending. Rarely do similar sites and services encourage users to appropriate that level of personal control. Within that, the myriad uses of any single LJ–brought on, in part, by LJ’s own confusion about what kind of service it wants to be–leads to subjective impressions on how posts should be treated by readers. When a reader fails to discern this–and, to be fair, how is a reader supposed to?–this can lead to resentment, nastiness, and drama, all intended by no one.
As fandom shifts itself more and more into the public perception and as LJ continues evolving along the lines of FaceSpace, I expect this will increasingly become a pertinent issue. I suspect that many LJ users will eventually come to the conclusion that locks and disclaimers aren’t all bad. Regardless, it should be an interesting case study in social interaction in a world almost entirely devoid of social clues.
lease, come inside my humble cottage and have a seat by the fire. Many are the stories here, and they are not the sorts of stories you'll often hear beyond these walls. Yes, the world is listening--and judging--but do not worry. You are safe here. I am the Heretic Loremaster. I read the same books as everyone else, but I read them a little differently: I don't necessarily take them at their word. I like to look at the stories that build our mythological history from the eyes of those disfavored by that history.
‘Assume’ does two things: it makes an ass out of u and me.
An old wisdom, but a pertinent one.
I hope I wasn’t one of the five to piss you off.
Also, I know the problem, I really do.
On my fandom journal I do my utmost to avoid mentioning real names of persons or places or any details concerning my jobs or my o-fic.
On my personal journal, I avoid mentioning anything to do with fandom…
At the same time, I don’t feel comfortable really talking about my personal thoughts there. Because people from “real life” might see it.
But to really open up on the fandom blog is out, too.
I guess I’m just paranoid.
I’m less concerned about revealing details in my personal life online (though I certainly understand the concern
) and pretty much everyone in my real life up to my boss’s boss knows I’m weird and geeky, so I’m not even particularly concerned about being “found out” per se. (Though it was a rather alarming experience when, at a recent family party, a cousin of mine told me that she Googled my pen name and found my stories … and thought they were pretty good! Which inspired another computer-savvy family member to declare that he was also Googling me as soon as he got home … but once I really thought about it, I’m not ashamed of my fiction and any problems people have with my stories are their problems, not mine. 
) The only things I keep soundly locked have to do with work, since my job is the sort that the media likes to get a hold of information about, which would not be a good thing …
Anyway …
It is a difficult conundrum. I figured you would understand, if anyone, because I know you’ve also reworked your LJ(s) over the years and also tend to attract rather passionate discourse. I think–I hope!–that I’ve finally found a decent balance. Time will tell.
I don’t have the energy or the wherewithal to work myself up into separating the different parts of my life that distinctly. I use my LJ to “show” my work to my f-list. I hope for and get feedback there, but usual it tends toward the positive. So I found another way to get the negative, “sorry, dear, this is not working” sort of criticism (The Lizard Council writers’ group).
I also use my LJ to pimp my work, tell people what I am thinking about, and grouse about the writing experience. I get a lot of encouragement and insight that way. Only recently have I decided to do a little maintenance to make my fiction on my LJ a little more accessible to new friends who were not there through the creative process. (I honestly would prefer people read my older work on HASA or the SWG, but people are funny and sometimes want to read it on my LJ. I don’t why they prefer that, but they do.)
On the impossibility of me cordoning off my life into neat little spaces: Well, if you visit my apartment, it would be obvious I don’t do that. It is attractive, but not conventional. Things are not neatly divided up. I write in my living room. I draw or paint in my kitchen. I read in my bedroom and the evidence is usually not that hard to find.
Last week I read a series of novels by a published writer and wanted to pimp them on my LJ. I have a lot of friends who I think would like his work. Of course, I couldn’t even confine my remarks in that one post to a book review. I did another part on meeting Pandemonium in the city last week and a third with baby pictures. The writer posted a comment to my LJ thanking me for talking about his working and admiring Baby Fingon. That’s me, sorry folks. Take me or leave me. (I do always warn for baby pictures, although I often forget to warn for smut!)
On revealing myself to the wider world: I guess I am so old I do not care anymore. I have shown my work to anyone who has asked to read it. My ex-mother-in-law has read my elf-pr0n, for example. I think people are entirely too defensive about fanfiction. If one is a great writer I doubt if one will be lost to world forever because someone found out that one had written fanfiction. (That could be true with breaking into the world of commercial potboilers, but I could never make a living at that, even if I could sell it, because I write too slow.) Fanfic is not my guilty secret. I am meeting more published writers and others who read it or have written it these days.
Here is a problem with me keeping up outside of LJ. How will I know if you respond to these entires, Dawn? I am not set up for an RSS feed–think it requires a download and my computer is running on no available memory space right now. (Will get a new one as soon as it crashes, but limping by for now.)
Similar problems cropped up on a sorta-semi-shared blogging site for students and alumni of the Fairest College about a year or so ago, and these problems had serious, real-life repercussions — a job lost, a relationship destroyed, that sort of thing. I will say to you what I said to the Fairest College people:
It is generally good policy to regard anything you post on the Internet, especially if it is not password-protected, as a public utterance, viewable to anyone who should happen upon it. Content that you don’t want people to see, You Don’t Post. I would take serious issue with your statement that “LiveJournal–in its name, its mission, and its history–carries with it the connotation of a personal safe space, a private journal.” LiveJournal is “Live.” It has always been more about a shared social space than a personal, private journaling space. That’s inherent in the nature of the Internet.
The LJ privacy controls are lovely, in that they let you control exactly who has access to a post, and that’s probably the best way to think of them. Forget the labels that LJ uses, like “public” and “private” — deconstructing those words will only cause you to forget the function of those settings. Instead, regard the default audience for your words as “everybody and their second cousins once removed,” and treat them accordingly. Change the audience as suits your words, but never forget that, on the Internet, the assumption is one of publicity.
I was just thinking that about the only thing I f-lock on my LJ these days is when I ciriticize my kids or their friends or just generally make myself sound like a perfect dufus in the process of blowing off steam.
Oshun: I was wholly of your view about separating things; it used to drive me nuts when my LJ friends had a half-dozen journals, each for a slightly different (though usually overlapping) purpose. Of course, it was so normative that I went along and assumed myself the odd one in thinking that tendency odd.
It wasn’t so much the mixture of fiction-meta-life that I found difficult but the fact that I assumed (wrongly and foolishly) that people wouldn’t be so critical of posts that (in my mind) were clearly personal or clearly letting off steam. I realized that this was an unfair expectation on my part.
I am a organization freak, though. LJ tags were the best thing to happen to me. I’ll make three posts in a row rather than mix topics too much. But that’s my right brain stretching itself a bit. However, I do lately tend to write and paint in the dining room rather than the study designed for that purpose … but that’s because Bobby and I have so many schoolbooks that they’re piled all over the study and there is no place to work!
I have to add a hearty “hell yeah” to your lack of shame about fanfic. Or writing in general. I refuse to be embarrassed by my creativity. If people I know aren’t embarrassed that they spend eight hours a night sitting on their duffs in front of the television, why should I be embarrassed that I write in my free time? As for the topics … well, sex is part of life. I never write PWP and don’t think that even my most lascivious stories could be considered “smut,” so if someone finds it horrifying that I write sex … well, I guess they need to find a new friend!
On RSS feeds, I recommend Google Reader, which does not require you to install new software and acts a lot like an email inbox. As for RSS feeds on comments, I think I need to add that. But if you comment on the blog, I will answer it. (Unlike my LJ, which is much more touch-and-go these days …)
French Pony: I think you may have interpretted my comment “LiveJournal–in its name, its mission, and its history–carries with it the connotation of a personal safe space, a private journal” differently than I meant it.
I didn’t mean that f-lock–or even p-lock–should act as a guarantee of security. That is a foolish level of Internet naivete that I lost more than a decade ago. I meant that LJ, compared to a blog or a forum, seems aimed more toward sharing one’s personal life and thoughts than a blog or forum, which are aimed more at encouraging public discourse, at least in my perception. When I make a post on my LJ, I have no delusions that a “friend” could share it with someone else or even make so innocent a mistake as leaving it open on her PC for a passerby to read. However, I did expect that if I made a post about my family, for example, than people would understand that this was not an appropriate place for criticism and debate. I see now that this was not a fair assumption when I was encouraging both on other posts.
Ha, I don’t even know what to do with my LJ. I basically have it only to read flocked fiction and I post something to it because otherwise it would look too empty.
I will *never* post fiction to my LJ, because in my opinion LJ is the worst solution ever to archive fanfic.
I will almost never post private stuff, because it’s private.
I will only rarely post fannish stuff, because others do that so much better.
So to me, LJ is nothing more but a crutch I need to get around in fandom.
I love the honesty of your response!
LJ is awkward as an archive, I agree. I did start posting my work there because I was too terrified to post it anywhere else, but the limitations quickly became plain. By then, of course, I had quite a readership. These days, I post to the SWG archive and, one day, will hopefully shift over to my website as well and then just use LJ to link to stuff.
Some fandoms are concentrated almost entirely on LJ, though. Because I’m strictly a Tolkien writer, I had something of a “wtf?” reaction to the panic over Strikethrough … until I realized that whole fandoms were terrified of the possibility of losing their archives because all of those archives were on LJ. Given the ease of software like eFiction, I don’t particularly understand this but … *shrug*
I’ve noticed that there are entired fandoms organized solely around/by LJ. I do get what looks so appealing about it – even an illiterate person could use it. You don’t need html-knowledge. You just need to know how to paste/copy. It’s very easy to interact with others and you can control who sees your content. It gives an author a feeling of “power” (that’s too strong a word, I realize, but I can’t think of anything better).
From a reader’s point, things look very differently, especially where multi-chaptered stories are concerned. I’m coming from BtVS, were every fandom person had his/her own website. I was quite surprised to find that with the Tolkien crowd it was a rare occurence to find a writer with a personal site (though that’s slowly changing). BtVS-fans were very skilled in webdesign, a lot of Tolkien fans don’t even know what RSS is.
Don’t take me wrong, I’m not saying that one fan is better than the other, but I always found it fascinating how a fandom seems to function like a living being – it has its own personality and it generally doesn’t want to change:)
Your comment on the author’s “power” on LJ is, I think, spot on. Incidentally, this is why I started posting my fanfic on LJ, despite dozens of wonderful Tolkien archives that aren’t ff.net. I was insecure and liked the idea that I could control who saw the story and the kind of feedback I received. If I wanted to make a story disappear forever, I could … well, to the extent that anything on the Internet can be made to go away forever. Of course, this never became an issue, but it was certainly in the back of my mind as a last resort emergency solution, if my stories got the flames I was so certain they deserved.
Tolkien is my first and only fandom, but I’m addicted to multi-fandom meta, and I’ve certainly noticed as well that Tolkien fans, in general, are out of the loop compared to fandom at large, both in terms of technical expertise and keeping up with inter-fandom news and issues. My theory on this is the age of the fandom. Yes, there are some fans (like me) who are young in years and in fannish involvement; when I was in high school, most people had the Internet at home (even if AOL dial-up
), and when I entered fandom, it was almost entirely online by that point. But a lot of Tolkien fans I know can fondly remember the days when fanzines and conventions were the only real “fix” available to people who wanted to be involved, and people snail-mailed stories to each other. To me, fandom is an Internet entity, so becoming fluent with how the Internet works is an essential part of being involved to the degree that I am. To them, it is so much broader and involvement can’t be so narrowly defined as willingness to learn HTML and CSS to build a website (which was one of the first things I did when I decided I wanted to be more than peripherally involved).
That’s my crackpot theory.
Fandom is interesting, both as a whole and in how individual fandoms (or even sub-groups within a single fandom) do things differently.
Yepp, the differences are what make things fun, but it also makes it hard to branch out into other groups. Every time you do so, you have to learn a new etiquette and I guess a lot of people are wary of stepping (incidentally) on anyone’s toes. I’m not like that. I like to jump in screeching loudly:)
The age might be a reason. There are certainly a lot more “mature” fans around than in other fandoms. I’d say, during my BtVS days most people were in their twens. Tolkien is broader – there are a lot of really young fans writing MS and there are a large number of “older” fans who’ve been around a while. The group is more diverse. I guess beíng “in the loop” also depends on the BNFs and what they bring into fandom. If a really influential fan suddenly migrates to another journal, blogging tool, archive s/he will draw others as well. At least that’s my guess.
[...] of the material as inspiration, example, and so on. I touched on this in a previous post, The Many Faces of LiveJournal, about how some LiveJournal users want their public posts to remain available to a public [...]