Withering spheres of privacy

We talked about the fact that many blogs are abandoned, and yet many others go on posting, unlinked-to and perhaps unread. You have to admire these people.
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Many bloggers are bringing to the table the online journal experiences from the end of the last century, before LiveJournal had collected a force of online diarists. If you wrote an online journal, it was for your own benefit, and for the benefit of your immediate friends; random visitors were a curiosity. As Google brought the masses into the journal communities, many writer locked or shut down their sites, in an effort to keep out the prying eyes of the many. "The private intermediate sphere, with its careful buffering, is shattered."

Nowadays, we've turned things on their end; no one is safe any longer from the prying eyes of the indexers; anything that is said on a journal may very well show up in a digital archive somewhere, locked permanently away in stone. I think this has dimmed the light of the journal writers, somewhat; some amazing works have been shuttered forever.

Danny wrote an insightful piece yesterday about O'Reilly's FOO camp, discussing the implications of public, private, and secret. Within is a brilliant quote: "The public is what we say to a crowd; the private is what we chatter amongst ourselves, when free from the demands of the crowd; and the secret is what we keep from everyone but our confidant." Highly recommended.