Drawing the Line of Personal Privacy Online: Where is it?
The more that I work as a journalist and as a writer, the more I feel the need/desire to censor myself—even just for personal space reasons. I’m a public person for the sole fact that I work in journalism, so boundaries between personal and professional have to be in place to some degree…you have to maintain some level of personal and professional integrity.
The internet was born and came of age after I was born, so the compulsion to share everything and anything about oneself is something I thankfully lack. However, I have struggled at times in deciding what to share of my personal life on this blog and other social media platforms—what do you share that will connect with your readers? What do you share to build some sense of a relationship/friendship with said readers? After all, social media is about and is formed around community, is it not?
Still, I try to keep my personal life out of it…most of the time.
This doesn’t exactly happen when it comes to writing about music. Music is such a visceral experience and the joy in sharing music with others revolves around that innate relationship we all have to music—removing personal experience just isn’t possible. I have the wonderful consequence of listening to some amazing sounds, boomeranging conversations with some prolific songwriters and composers, and at the end of the day teem with an intangible resulting spark.
My work in the industry has undoubtedly led to relationships and friendships that I wouldn’t trade for anything…you find your people where you find your people. What I haven’t wasn’t prepared for (who knows why? It’s the music industry, right?) were groupies (theirs, not mine.) Groupies are different than hardcore fans (All groupies are fans, but not all fans are groupies.) and the lack of distinction between what is appropriate to share and what is far too personal to blast to “public” people IN PUBLIC has me wondering what the hell happened.
Am I just behind on a trend that I find appalling? Or am I the weirdo that looks at the trend of over-sharing personal information as a voluntary violation of personal privacy? Granted, it’s not just groupies that do it…I guess that everyone wants the fifteen minutes of fame that Warhol guaranteed all those years ago. Or perhaps I’m still wrapped up in Marshall McLuhan’s “the message is in the medium.”
So where do you draw it? How personal is too personal? How personal is not personal enough?
And what is the kicker in setting those boundaries?
D'écriture has an official FB page
I finally have a journalist page on Facebook where I’ll be updating a little more about the bands/musicians I’m covering, so check out (especially if you’re a musician and think I should be aware of your work!)
Do not go gentle into that good night
Tonight I found out that a friend of mine from college, a professor still teaching at the school, passed away rather suddenly and abruptly at the age of 59. A great man, former military, who taught kids how to draw. He’d just returned from a trip to Thailand.
This is the second death that I’ve heard about by way of FB in the last three weeks and as the news of his death travels, I am both amazed and grateful for Facebook in way that I haven’t quite accepted yet. It has allowed the hundreds of thousands of us that were his students, his military buddies, his friends, and his family to share in our grief from all over the place. Some of these people I haven’t seen in several years—we keep in touch with the occasional email or the once in a blue moon phone call. In a way, we are able to reach out to one another, have something to touch that Tom “touched” even though it isn’t “physical” per se…
Over the last few years, I have learnt about the passing of several friends by way of the internet—specifically Facebook—and have made much fuss over the inappropriateness of such notification. I suppose my opposition came from the fact that I grew up in a time when such terrible news was passed by way of telephone, letter, and in person. However, as time has passed and the breadth of my social circle has scattered itself across the globe, the quickness with which news spreads online has somehow allowed me to be closer to those who mutually share in loss—no matter where in the world they may be.
I don’t know quite what to say. The shock of it all is so fresh. To share the news is to somehow share with one another a mutual understanding of the loss we all share in the absence of the ones that left us too soon.
I was never interested in Facebook or MySpace because they feel like malls to me. Twitter actually feels like the street. You can bump into anybody on Twitter.
William Gibson (via mattermedia, davidbarrie)
I felt the same way … until twitter redesigned their interface. #TheNewTwitter has all the charm of meeting at a food court in the basement of a mall: I’d like to talk but I can’t hear you above the fluorescent glare and the smell of the deep fryers.
(via hm3)
^This!
Source: hm3
Dear Twitter,
Everything about you is angled towards simple, efficient minimalism -from 140 characters to the lists feature to the nifty little “retweet” icon that you created. Why do you insist on borrowing clutter from Facebook? Not only have you littered my sidebar with the new “Who to Follow” feature, but you have killed, on some fundamental level, the very organic way in which I like to find new information (or followees, if you will). There is a certain amount of fun in raiding someone else’s feed for clever anecdotes or interesting links, which ultimately might lead me to follow someone new. I like Twitter because it’s streamlined and for the most part, I only have to see the information that I have chosen to see (i.e. from the people I personally have handpicked to follow). Twitter, you are not a social network. You are an information exchange network. Why must you change your mind and add to the information overload that your users didn’t have to be subjected to prior to this new feature?
Please change it back… or at least add a “Hide” function so that we don’t have to look at it if we don’t want to.
