I used to read a really odd assortment of blogs. By that, I don’t mean that I read a bunch of Mormon Mommy Blogs (though I do that now) or that I read the AOL Baby Name message boards (which I did when I was 13 and thought Cinnamon might be a good name for a human), but that back in the days of LiveJournal–late high school, early college for me–I often came across the blogs of friends of friends, or friends of acquaintances, or acquaintances of acquaintances…and then got sucked in.
I don’t even know how I found those blogs. Once you’re on LiveJournal you can click your way around circles of people, yes, but I don’t know how I got there in the first place. Google? I don’t think so. Possibly. Or AOL profiles. Most of them didn’t interest me, being about people I’d never met, but a few stayed with me. Which is how I ended up reading the online diaries of a highschool friend of one of my freshman classmates, or my ex-boyfriend’s brother’s ex-girlfriend.
Maybe I should also mention that if I went to college with you, there’s a good chance I know your middle name. Well, “good” is probably an exaggeration. There’s a higher-than-I-should-admit-to chance. All I can say in my defense is that I have a really good memory for things like that–the other day, someone responded to my email with “Claire! What a nice surprise, and what a terrifying display of memory!” If it still sounds bizarre, just tell yourself that it’s not bizarre now…it’s just the remnants of my bizarre late-teenage self looking through the university’s online facebook (in the years just before Facebook) too often. Or the class directory.
Those paragraphs were a few rounds of winding up to say that blogging, and it’s veil of impermanence floating over its actual permanence, is utterly unnerving, even though I’m not writing about my own personal life. Because who knows who’s reading? The cousin of someone I knew in preschool? A Facebook friend of a friend? Face to face, I’m not particularly (at all) private or filtered. But spoken words don’t kick around in bytes forever. I recently read both So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and Terms of Service, so I’m appropriately terrified of the internet.
And yet.
PS: I also recently read The Viral Storm and came across this passage…I was ready to agree, after Terms of Service, that data mining is pretty epically wrong even if it’s often useful, but then this:
Certainly complicates things in an interesting way.
