puppetmaker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
puppetmaker) wrote2008-01-14 10:27 pm
puppetmaker) wrote2008-01-14 10:27 pm
LJ Idol 4.10 : Whose Live Journal is it anyway?
The Topic for the week:
Whose LJ is it anyway? Balancing personal expression and friends-list sensibilities in determining content.
Which I am putting behind a cut to save my friends list.
This is a topic I have been thinking about for a while now for a number of reasons. I have a pretty extensive list of people that I keep up with via their web log and they keep up with me through mine.
I started by web log to keep my parents and close friends apprised of what I was up to and what Caroline was doing since she was changing from day to day. The place where my original web log was and still is runs off my husband's site. He started his web log while I was still pregnant with Caroline. He even had a contest for the readers as to when she would be born and how much she would weigh and her gender (which we did not know beforehand).
I knew early on that my web log was going to be read by people I have never met or only knew from my encounters with them on the Internet. Because of my husband's regular column in Comic Buyers Guide, I had gotten use to the fact that people remember things he wrote about that concerned our lives. And I knew what I wrote would also be remembered by people that I might met at a convention or other social situations. So I have always been a self-censor while typing things that go out into the Internet. I know that whatever I put here could come back and bite me on the rump.
I got on Live Journal because my younger sister (my only sister) had one and it was an easy way to keep up with her. I found out that other friends were here as well and pretty soon I had a friends list made up of people I knew. Then I started adding friends of friends that I liked to read. And friends of friends added me to their list. I have never hid who I was and who I was married to nor did I make a big deal about it. And eventually some people who were fans of his added me usually after asking me it was OK. I added people I met in communities that I enjoyed reading and it blossomed from there.
Now I had hit a point where I had quite a number of people reading me that I didn't know. And I made a decision to put a couple of layers on my live journal. I don't have too many entries that are friends only. A lot of those are memes that I just want to share with people who have taken the time to add me to their reading list. But there is not much I have put out here that I don't mind that others know. I do have a private list for things that I need to put out of my head. I also have a paper journal that I use for my "brain dumps".
Things I try to avoid are profanity (I tend to use slang or fake words), offending the various religions of the people who read this (which can be walking a tightrope), and politics (because I have seen what it does to my husband's board). But those who know me probably have a pretty good feel where I stand on things. Most people know I am an ardent defender of the 1st amendment along with my husband. They know that I am an old school Whovian along with a number of other fandoms. People know my love of puppetry and doll making and costuming.
I have adjusted to being a rather public person. I can even speak to a large group and not feel uncomfortable which was not always true. I look at my web log as speaking to a large group of people and adjust what I say accordingly. So it's my spot on the web and I'll say what I want to. I don't force anyone to read it nor do I get upset if someone decides that my web log is not their cuppa and so far that has worked well for me.
Whose LJ is it anyway? Balancing personal expression and friends-list sensibilities in determining content.
Which I am putting behind a cut to save my friends list.
This is a topic I have been thinking about for a while now for a number of reasons. I have a pretty extensive list of people that I keep up with via their web log and they keep up with me through mine.
I started by web log to keep my parents and close friends apprised of what I was up to and what Caroline was doing since she was changing from day to day. The place where my original web log was and still is runs off my husband's site. He started his web log while I was still pregnant with Caroline. He even had a contest for the readers as to when she would be born and how much she would weigh and her gender (which we did not know beforehand).
I knew early on that my web log was going to be read by people I have never met or only knew from my encounters with them on the Internet. Because of my husband's regular column in Comic Buyers Guide, I had gotten use to the fact that people remember things he wrote about that concerned our lives. And I knew what I wrote would also be remembered by people that I might met at a convention or other social situations. So I have always been a self-censor while typing things that go out into the Internet. I know that whatever I put here could come back and bite me on the rump.
I got on Live Journal because my younger sister (my only sister) had one and it was an easy way to keep up with her. I found out that other friends were here as well and pretty soon I had a friends list made up of people I knew. Then I started adding friends of friends that I liked to read. And friends of friends added me to their list. I have never hid who I was and who I was married to nor did I make a big deal about it. And eventually some people who were fans of his added me usually after asking me it was OK. I added people I met in communities that I enjoyed reading and it blossomed from there.
Now I had hit a point where I had quite a number of people reading me that I didn't know. And I made a decision to put a couple of layers on my live journal. I don't have too many entries that are friends only. A lot of those are memes that I just want to share with people who have taken the time to add me to their reading list. But there is not much I have put out here that I don't mind that others know. I do have a private list for things that I need to put out of my head. I also have a paper journal that I use for my "brain dumps".
Things I try to avoid are profanity (I tend to use slang or fake words), offending the various religions of the people who read this (which can be walking a tightrope), and politics (because I have seen what it does to my husband's board). But those who know me probably have a pretty good feel where I stand on things. Most people know I am an ardent defender of the 1st amendment along with my husband. They know that I am an old school Whovian along with a number of other fandoms. People know my love of puppetry and doll making and costuming.
I have adjusted to being a rather public person. I can even speak to a large group and not feel uncomfortable which was not always true. I look at my web log as speaking to a large group of people and adjust what I say accordingly. So it's my spot on the web and I'll say what I want to. I don't force anyone to read it nor do I get upset if someone decides that my web log is not their cuppa and so far that has worked well for me.
no subject
I have no idea how old he is, and I don't want to freak you out, but I've been telling smutty sites (basically written porn. usually softcore, the harder core writing is pretty laughable because it's poorly written) that I'm old enough to read them since I was 15 (I'm now 21, so I no longer have to lie anymore).
If he has an account and he's given his correct birth year, LJ will automatically lock him out of racier posts (again, assuming that your LJ friends have correctly tagged their posts as inappropriate for anyone under the age of 14, 17 or legal adult). And, so long as your son isn't smart enough to log out of his account and make a new one lying about his age, he should be alright content wise. To be honest, it *never* occurred to me until the past year or so to blatently lie about my age (claim I was born in the 1950s), and I've only done so because verifying that I'm old enough to read adultfanfiction.net is a pain in the ass. I have to specify a month, date, year and then sign my name. It's gotten to the point where I just click any random month, date year (usually somewhere around the 1950s or the 1940s) and type in random letters to the 'signature' portion.
I often find the whole "inappropriate for someone under 14" rating amusing, since you have to at least be 13 in order to *get* an account.
Again, I don't know how old your kid is, but as a suggestion, if you're worried about what he reads online, I'd suggest talking to him about your concerns. And then offering to discuss anything he has questions about. Because there are ways that kids can run across things their parents don't approve of accidentally (geocities used to run pretty racy ads, last I saw, Facebook does too).
I'm only suggesting that because I got all my sex education from the Internetz, simply because my parents were not okay with discussing sex with me. I got a book instead of an actual discussion on what *really* goes on during sex. All the book told me was the uh...'insertion' part. It never told me why the hell you'd want to do that. It never told me what lead up to that. I had already read my mother's smut books (Catherine Coulter = All the awesome!), so I figured foreplay was part of it, but because I don't believe anything from just *one* source, I wanted to know if the foreplay part was true. The sex ed book didn't tell me any of *that* all it gave me was the insertion.
And I was all "...that's it? So *how* do you get there?! Are you just sitting around, watching TV and then you're all, 'Hey, let's stick tab A into slot B and make a baby!' 'Okay!'" I didn't get the *why* you'd want to, simply because my mother was too much of a coward to *tell* me about foreplay leading into the insertion. And about how you have raging hormones to urge you to move *into* the foreplay.
Which, had I been a boy, I might have known right that part right off the bat. The part I wouldn't have known was how to make it good for the girl, because my dad's not comfortable talking about sex either, and I'm sure it wouldn't be any different if I were a boy. I'm sure I would've only been informed about the insertion part and nothing else. And I'm sure that being a boy with raging hormones, I would've had the guts to say "well, that's all well and good, dad, but HOW DO I CONVINCE A GIRL TO LET ME INSERT IT?!" Because that's what my 8th grade boyfriend was the most interested in. How to get me to have sex with him.
< /end advice >
But like I said, I don't know how old your son is, or what your relationship with him is like, so I'm basing all this off assumptions, and please don't be too harsh with me if I'm insanely off the mark [[hides]]