Nov 12ths reading

November 12, 2008’s reading for com 430z was titled “Shout into the wind, and it shouts back.” by Lori Kendall, which was published in 2007, online in First Monday, volume 12, under Identity and interactional tensions on LiveJournal. This was retrieved on August 21, 2008 from http:/firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_9/kindall.index.html.

This reading was about a weblogging system called LiveJournal. The name basically spells out what this system is intended for, which is online journals. This system also contains built-in social networking features. In this reading the author explains her hands-on research of LiveJournal and many of the concerns and problems that can occur with this technology. The first problem that she brings up is that Journals are originally supposed to be private. When they are put online, this isn’t the case anymore. Even know not everybody can gain access to your journal the main idea around LiveJournal is that information can be made public. So a problem occurs when people want privacy, but still would like some kind of feedback from an audience. The next problem that occurs is that: in life most people keep friend and family networks separated to some degree. Form Lori’s experience and research many people’s networks were colliding leaving the person in the middle not able to show their different sides to the different networks. A good example of this would be that most people don’t speak to their mother the way they speak to their friends. Another problem that LiveJournal runs into is that people can use built-in features to filter what information is accessible to whom. This can obviously help out with privacy issues, but it can also hinder connections between people. The last problem the author brings up is that people want comments from others, but most people don’t comment on many issues, usually just trivial issues.
Her thought on this is that people don’t want to be seen in a different light then the one they are portraying on LiveJournal, and taking a side or giving a piece of mind might do exactly that.