Blogging is totes a scholarly pursuit
Nov. 4th, 2009 12:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
laliandraSo a few months the lovely ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kaiserkuchen interviewed me for her Thesis paper - “Online Blogging & Young Women: The Use of Language and the Internet in Articulating Identity” and she sent me the transcript today. It's a really interesting topic that made me think a lot about me and online life and RL, plus seeing my rambling chattering put down in text form has amused me all day.
So I thought I would present to you selected highlights of The Story of Lal as Blogger, and if you want to chat about You as Blogger then that would be awesome, or if you would just like to ask me about anything I've said or why I use the word "like" so much, that would be cool too.
Also, it means I get to share my dreamwidth analogy with y'all. I am proud of it, what can I say! (--) means a pause, by the way. There are a good few...
Interviewer (Kaz!):When did you first start blogging and how did you even get started?
Lal: Well, I first started blogging properly just over a year ago (--) basically I was in a—I belonged to a Harry Potter fansite and the fansite folded, basically, and everyone switched to LJ. But I used to hang around and lurk on LJ before that, so to carry on and interact with the people I had met on this forum I got a Livejournal! And it was all downhill from there (laughs).
I: Did you actually use to keep written journals and diaries beforehand, and if you did, do you do so know?
Lal: I used to keep a typed journal from when I was like 15 until I was about 17 and then I did that for a bit— and then I kept bits and bobs when I was in my first year of university, but then I wasn’t a particularly good person in terms of— I used to leave it for months and months and then come back to it but yeah (laughs). On and off, really.
I: And how would you describe the content of these early journals?
Lal: It was all very (---) teenage angst (laughs). I started it (--) I don’t really know why. It was all really stuff that was going on at school and with my friends, with my first boyfriend (--) They’re all so cringe-worthy. When I read it now I am all “oh no, I was so self-involved!”. It was a way to record my day and I’ve always found that if you put stuff down on paper you can work out, and sort of untangle your thought processes about it.
I: Would you ever consider switching blogging platforms?
Lal: Erm, I don’t (---) I’m not really sure that I’d see the point? I mean, recently there’s been a whole sort of thing about Dreamwidth, which I have, but don’t use. Well, I use it because when you go to Dreamwidth for stuff, everyone has age restrictions, but if you had an account they wouldn’t keep asking you (--) It was like getting ID-ed all the time in a really overzealous bar—“Are you over 18? Are you? Really?” And I’m like, “yes, yes I am.” I’m just happy I have one that’s in my name, and that’s all I want. So, that aside I wouldn’t see why I would want to change (--) I really like Livejournal, so, and I know how Livejournal works (laughs).
I: How would you say the separation between your online and offline life is, do the two elements mix or is there a strict separation?
Lal: I think in the beginning I kept them quite separate. I don’t use my real name on Livejournal or on the forums or anything. I used a nickname, but it was a nickname I had when I was younger so it still feels like my name. But in the beginning I kept it quite separate and didn’t even tell people I had a Livejournal or anything. But more recently um, just as I’ve gotten more involved with it, you start wanting to tell people about the friends you’ve made or stuff that you’ve found out. So now I do tell real life friends about the people I know from the internet (--) about three months ago, in July? I went to a book-signing of an author who I discovered online and whose Livejournal community I’d joined and made friends with various people there. So I went and met people from the internet! It was weird, but also really cool. It really does bleed through after a while, I hadn’t expected it to, but it really does! You know you’re like talking to someone and then you’ll be like “oh I know that too, because I have a friend who lives in Canada” or like “ my friend recommended this book to me”, “my American friends think this about that” and yeah. Ta daa! It’s really cool, I love the internet for that. But you’d have to be a bit careful about the details you reveal about how you precisely met your internet friends to your real life ones.
My housemates knew, because I was quite involved running a fictive book discussion on of the communities, and I’d tell them I was running an online book club, because it’d take quite a lot of time (laughs) and they’d be like “what the hell are you doing in your room for three hours that you’d had to be there for those three hours?” So I’d tell them about the online book club people and then sort of gradually (---) yeah.
I think there should be some sort of secret sign that you should be able to make at people—like I have a friend and then it turned out that he had read Harry Potter fanfiction and had done so for years and years and we just hadn’t known this about each other, and we’ve known each other for like three years (laughs). He sort of mentioned it, and I went “whaaaat!”. It was extremely exciting! There’s definitely a kind of vagueness—you sort of mention to people that there are people you know that are on the internet, and I think it sort of depends on each person as well, for how much you let on about it (laughs).
I: We touched upon this earlier, but do you believe in having multiple blogging accounts?
Lal: Well, I guess I pretty much just have Livejournal (-----) but I guess I would sort of consider it. I started out using the filter function on my entries, so that certain people wouldn’t see what I wrote, but um (--) I don’t know. I’ve sort of stopped doing that, and I’ve also pretty much unlocked everything and just put everything behind a cut and gone “if you want to read it, you can, but if you don’t, then no need”. I think because I do feel that my online persona is sort of (---) if you create it, you’re putting a part of yourself online, and you just have to deal with that (laughs) I know a lot of people who— I think it’s more people whose real lives and online lives are intertwined tend to lock a lot more stuff, I’ve noticed. People whose real friends, say, know about their Livejournals and then they’ll lock things where they’re, like, complaining about people they know in real life and all that sort of thing. And because that’s not something that I really do, and no one that I know in real life knows about my Livejournal apart from one person (--) So yeah, I’ve never really seen the point of locking stuff? You’ve got an online journal (laughs)! You have an online journal— what’s the point in locking it? Basically I’m just like, no one is forcing anybody to read about the stuff I post here. If you don’t want to, you don’t have to!
I: You mentioned that one friend who was in the know, do any other people in your life know about your Livejournal?
Lal: Well, my boyfriend kind of knows because I use his computer all the time, so (laughs). It’s the-e-e-re, in his bookmarks. But he’s never really expressed much of an interest to see what’s in there, which I really— I totally would! If I found out that someone I knew had a blog, I’d be massively interested to see what was in it, but he isn’t. And my other friend basically found it because she was using my computer (--) But she was sort of a computer— internet person herself and already had a Livejournal of her own and uses fan-forums for her own kind of stuff. It wasn’t that big of a shock for her, but kind of a big one for me (laughs)! It was like being outed, I felt quite uncomfortable with it at the time—it was quite early on.
I: Would you feel comfortable if your parents knew about it?
Lal: My dad knew that I was like, writing fanfiction. My parents were massively liberal, so they’re not the kind of parents whom I’ve had to be all “yeah, I’m meeting people from the internet, don't freak”. I told my dad all about going to meet these people for this author-thing, and how I’d won this competition online and how I’d got this book and my t-shirt, and he thought it was really, really cool. I had supportive parents, pretty much! I only have my dad, because my mum (---) passed away, so. My whole family is like crazy liberal, so I don’t think that they would be bothered by it. I don’t really talk to my dad about (--) some aspects of fandom (laughs), but some of the stuff, yeah sure, I do a bit.
I: So who would you consider to be the main audience of your blog, and do you see yourself as blogging to an audience? Or does it still remain a personal thing to you?
Lal: I mean, there is an element of writing to an audience— like trying to be amusing, trying to be entertaining or being informative at least. But yeah, I mean I don’t have a massive friends list or anything, and I don’t add people randomly, it tends to be people with whom I’d actually want to be in more of a dialogue in with, than just me sort of grandstanding to them, I think. It’s people I want to have a conversation with, and go “this is my life” and find out more about their lives— more like a two-way thing.
I: Do you think that online friendships or friendships that started from online meetings can be considered on the same basis as real life friendships?
Lal: I think some of them, sure! Like some of the people I’ve met online, I probably have more contact with them than I do with people with whom I went to school with five years ago, but still consider friends and probably talk to about once a month if that. Whereas some online friends I talk to every day, practically. So I think definitely, some friends you consider sort of just part of your flist, and some people sort of segue into - what you consider that if you’d met them in class or whatever, you’d like to think that you would’ve become friends with them anyway. I think it’s also that the stigma of having met people online has faded, which I think is good, because it’s like joining a university society or something—because if you said “I met someone at dance class and now we’re friends” or “I met someone at a real life book club and now we’re friends”, no one would even bat an eyelid (--) I think it’s less so now, but people will still (--) if you went “I met someone on the internet” they’d still be all “ri-i-i-i-ght” (laughs).
I: Would you consider the information you reveal about yourself enough to make people “know you”, and how do you decide the amount of personal information to share?
Lal: Well, I mean (---) If someone I knew found my blog, they’d know it was me (laughs). I don’t have my real name, or the name of anyone I know or live with mentioned, everyone gets a pseudonym, but I’ve said the town in England where I live (--) it’s a big city, so I don’t think that would be so much of an issue. And there are no pictures of my face (--) I think you talk about quite a lot of stuff, but I think there’s a bit of stuff you don’t mention as well. It’s like having random conversations with people, and you have to try and build a picture of the person from those. But I think you can.
I: What do you think are the negative aspects of blogging?
Lal: (----) I don’t really know, because I’ve only had a really positive experience with Livejournal, but (---) it’s quite easy for people to hide certain aspects of their personality online, I think, than in real life, because online you’ve always got such a really long time to consider what you’ll be saying before you put it down, and I think that could be an issue. And also, you know you make friends with people who live on the other side of the world and you don’t get to see them and that’s upsetting. I think there is always the possibility that people become more involved with their online lives than their real lives (--) but I think it’s good that there’s somewhere for people to find people that they can get along with. Because there’s no guarantee you’re gonna get along with the people you go to school with, or work with and if you’ve found somewhere with people you get along with, I think it’s fine if that’s the internet. I think the internet is like the real world— there are really, really cool people, and really unpleasant people, you just have to kind of accept that and move on.
I: Any closing remarks?
Lal: I said way earlier in the interview how I’ve always found that writing stuff down helps untangle how you feel about things, and I think that’s true about blogging. I think a lot of the blogs that people have are a way for them to put down— relate an experience and decide how they feel about it by writing about it and getting other people to talk about it, which I think is really interesting. And it’s also interesting because quite often you can get an outsider perspective on a problem and if you, I don’t know, have a problem with someone you live with, or are not so sure what to do with your life, you just write down what you feel about it and get a range of perspectives from people who like don’t come at it with the same emotional attachments to you as with your best friends or your parents or something. It’s like you work out which bits of you are important, I guess, because like I said it’s quite easy to (--) suppress parts of your personality when online (--) so you know, you work out which bits are the ones you want to portray to the world.
I think you all should know that "Any closing remarks?" May not have been exactly what Kaz asked here, but to protect her Interviewer-ly credentials, I will not say what it was. I am also amused that she cut the bit in the "parents" section where I said something along the lines of "I tend not to mention the porn!"
So, thoughts, fellow bloggers? This has mostly made me want to blog more. Can you start NaNoBloMo (where you blog every day for a month) halfway through a month? Or is that wicked cheating?
<3
kaiserkuchen interviewed me for her Thesis paper - “Online Blogging & Young Women: The Use of Language and the Internet in Articulating Identity” and she sent me the transcript today. It's a really interesting topic that made me think a lot about me and online life and RL, plus seeing my rambling chattering put down in text form has amused me all day. So I thought I would present to you selected highlights of The Story of Lal as Blogger, and if you want to chat about You as Blogger then that would be awesome, or if you would just like to ask me about anything I've said or why I use the word "like" so much, that would be cool too.
Also, it means I get to share my dreamwidth analogy with y'all. I am proud of it, what can I say! (--) means a pause, by the way. There are a good few...
Interviewer (Kaz!):When did you first start blogging and how did you even get started?
Lal: Well, I first started blogging properly just over a year ago (--) basically I was in a—I belonged to a Harry Potter fansite and the fansite folded, basically, and everyone switched to LJ. But I used to hang around and lurk on LJ before that, so to carry on and interact with the people I had met on this forum I got a Livejournal! And it was all downhill from there (laughs).
I: Did you actually use to keep written journals and diaries beforehand, and if you did, do you do so know?
Lal: I used to keep a typed journal from when I was like 15 until I was about 17 and then I did that for a bit— and then I kept bits and bobs when I was in my first year of university, but then I wasn’t a particularly good person in terms of— I used to leave it for months and months and then come back to it but yeah (laughs). On and off, really.
I: And how would you describe the content of these early journals?
Lal: It was all very (---) teenage angst (laughs). I started it (--) I don’t really know why. It was all really stuff that was going on at school and with my friends, with my first boyfriend (--) They’re all so cringe-worthy. When I read it now I am all “oh no, I was so self-involved!”. It was a way to record my day and I’ve always found that if you put stuff down on paper you can work out, and sort of untangle your thought processes about it.
I: Would you ever consider switching blogging platforms?
Lal: Erm, I don’t (---) I’m not really sure that I’d see the point? I mean, recently there’s been a whole sort of thing about Dreamwidth, which I have, but don’t use. Well, I use it because when you go to Dreamwidth for stuff, everyone has age restrictions, but if you had an account they wouldn’t keep asking you (--) It was like getting ID-ed all the time in a really overzealous bar—“Are you over 18? Are you? Really?” And I’m like, “yes, yes I am.” I’m just happy I have one that’s in my name, and that’s all I want. So, that aside I wouldn’t see why I would want to change (--) I really like Livejournal, so, and I know how Livejournal works (laughs).
I: How would you say the separation between your online and offline life is, do the two elements mix or is there a strict separation?
Lal: I think in the beginning I kept them quite separate. I don’t use my real name on Livejournal or on the forums or anything. I used a nickname, but it was a nickname I had when I was younger so it still feels like my name. But in the beginning I kept it quite separate and didn’t even tell people I had a Livejournal or anything. But more recently um, just as I’ve gotten more involved with it, you start wanting to tell people about the friends you’ve made or stuff that you’ve found out. So now I do tell real life friends about the people I know from the internet (--) about three months ago, in July? I went to a book-signing of an author who I discovered online and whose Livejournal community I’d joined and made friends with various people there. So I went and met people from the internet! It was weird, but also really cool. It really does bleed through after a while, I hadn’t expected it to, but it really does! You know you’re like talking to someone and then you’ll be like “oh I know that too, because I have a friend who lives in Canada” or like “ my friend recommended this book to me”, “my American friends think this about that” and yeah. Ta daa! It’s really cool, I love the internet for that. But you’d have to be a bit careful about the details you reveal about how you precisely met your internet friends to your real life ones.
My housemates knew, because I was quite involved running a fictive book discussion on of the communities, and I’d tell them I was running an online book club, because it’d take quite a lot of time (laughs) and they’d be like “what the hell are you doing in your room for three hours that you’d had to be there for those three hours?” So I’d tell them about the online book club people and then sort of gradually (---) yeah.
I think there should be some sort of secret sign that you should be able to make at people—like I have a friend and then it turned out that he had read Harry Potter fanfiction and had done so for years and years and we just hadn’t known this about each other, and we’ve known each other for like three years (laughs). He sort of mentioned it, and I went “whaaaat!”. It was extremely exciting! There’s definitely a kind of vagueness—you sort of mention to people that there are people you know that are on the internet, and I think it sort of depends on each person as well, for how much you let on about it (laughs).
I: We touched upon this earlier, but do you believe in having multiple blogging accounts?
Lal: Well, I guess I pretty much just have Livejournal (-----) but I guess I would sort of consider it. I started out using the filter function on my entries, so that certain people wouldn’t see what I wrote, but um (--) I don’t know. I’ve sort of stopped doing that, and I’ve also pretty much unlocked everything and just put everything behind a cut and gone “if you want to read it, you can, but if you don’t, then no need”. I think because I do feel that my online persona is sort of (---) if you create it, you’re putting a part of yourself online, and you just have to deal with that (laughs) I know a lot of people who— I think it’s more people whose real lives and online lives are intertwined tend to lock a lot more stuff, I’ve noticed. People whose real friends, say, know about their Livejournals and then they’ll lock things where they’re, like, complaining about people they know in real life and all that sort of thing. And because that’s not something that I really do, and no one that I know in real life knows about my Livejournal apart from one person (--) So yeah, I’ve never really seen the point of locking stuff? You’ve got an online journal (laughs)! You have an online journal— what’s the point in locking it? Basically I’m just like, no one is forcing anybody to read about the stuff I post here. If you don’t want to, you don’t have to!
I: You mentioned that one friend who was in the know, do any other people in your life know about your Livejournal?
Lal: Well, my boyfriend kind of knows because I use his computer all the time, so (laughs). It’s the-e-e-re, in his bookmarks. But he’s never really expressed much of an interest to see what’s in there, which I really— I totally would! If I found out that someone I knew had a blog, I’d be massively interested to see what was in it, but he isn’t. And my other friend basically found it because she was using my computer (--) But she was sort of a computer— internet person herself and already had a Livejournal of her own and uses fan-forums for her own kind of stuff. It wasn’t that big of a shock for her, but kind of a big one for me (laughs)! It was like being outed, I felt quite uncomfortable with it at the time—it was quite early on.
I: Would you feel comfortable if your parents knew about it?
Lal: My dad knew that I was like, writing fanfiction. My parents were massively liberal, so they’re not the kind of parents whom I’ve had to be all “yeah, I’m meeting people from the internet, don't freak”. I told my dad all about going to meet these people for this author-thing, and how I’d won this competition online and how I’d got this book and my t-shirt, and he thought it was really, really cool. I had supportive parents, pretty much! I only have my dad, because my mum (---) passed away, so. My whole family is like crazy liberal, so I don’t think that they would be bothered by it. I don’t really talk to my dad about (--) some aspects of fandom (laughs), but some of the stuff, yeah sure, I do a bit.
I: So who would you consider to be the main audience of your blog, and do you see yourself as blogging to an audience? Or does it still remain a personal thing to you?
Lal: I mean, there is an element of writing to an audience— like trying to be amusing, trying to be entertaining or being informative at least. But yeah, I mean I don’t have a massive friends list or anything, and I don’t add people randomly, it tends to be people with whom I’d actually want to be in more of a dialogue in with, than just me sort of grandstanding to them, I think. It’s people I want to have a conversation with, and go “this is my life” and find out more about their lives— more like a two-way thing.
I: Do you think that online friendships or friendships that started from online meetings can be considered on the same basis as real life friendships?
Lal: I think some of them, sure! Like some of the people I’ve met online, I probably have more contact with them than I do with people with whom I went to school with five years ago, but still consider friends and probably talk to about once a month if that. Whereas some online friends I talk to every day, practically. So I think definitely, some friends you consider sort of just part of your flist, and some people sort of segue into - what you consider that if you’d met them in class or whatever, you’d like to think that you would’ve become friends with them anyway. I think it’s also that the stigma of having met people online has faded, which I think is good, because it’s like joining a university society or something—because if you said “I met someone at dance class and now we’re friends” or “I met someone at a real life book club and now we’re friends”, no one would even bat an eyelid (--) I think it’s less so now, but people will still (--) if you went “I met someone on the internet” they’d still be all “ri-i-i-i-ght” (laughs).
I: Would you consider the information you reveal about yourself enough to make people “know you”, and how do you decide the amount of personal information to share?
Lal: Well, I mean (---) If someone I knew found my blog, they’d know it was me (laughs). I don’t have my real name, or the name of anyone I know or live with mentioned, everyone gets a pseudonym, but I’ve said the town in England where I live (--) it’s a big city, so I don’t think that would be so much of an issue. And there are no pictures of my face (--) I think you talk about quite a lot of stuff, but I think there’s a bit of stuff you don’t mention as well. It’s like having random conversations with people, and you have to try and build a picture of the person from those. But I think you can.
I: What do you think are the negative aspects of blogging?
Lal: (----) I don’t really know, because I’ve only had a really positive experience with Livejournal, but (---) it’s quite easy for people to hide certain aspects of their personality online, I think, than in real life, because online you’ve always got such a really long time to consider what you’ll be saying before you put it down, and I think that could be an issue. And also, you know you make friends with people who live on the other side of the world and you don’t get to see them and that’s upsetting. I think there is always the possibility that people become more involved with their online lives than their real lives (--) but I think it’s good that there’s somewhere for people to find people that they can get along with. Because there’s no guarantee you’re gonna get along with the people you go to school with, or work with and if you’ve found somewhere with people you get along with, I think it’s fine if that’s the internet. I think the internet is like the real world— there are really, really cool people, and really unpleasant people, you just have to kind of accept that and move on.
I: Any closing remarks?
Lal: I said way earlier in the interview how I’ve always found that writing stuff down helps untangle how you feel about things, and I think that’s true about blogging. I think a lot of the blogs that people have are a way for them to put down— relate an experience and decide how they feel about it by writing about it and getting other people to talk about it, which I think is really interesting. And it’s also interesting because quite often you can get an outsider perspective on a problem and if you, I don’t know, have a problem with someone you live with, or are not so sure what to do with your life, you just write down what you feel about it and get a range of perspectives from people who like don’t come at it with the same emotional attachments to you as with your best friends or your parents or something. It’s like you work out which bits of you are important, I guess, because like I said it’s quite easy to (--) suppress parts of your personality when online (--) so you know, you work out which bits are the ones you want to portray to the world.
I think you all should know that "Any closing remarks?" May not have been exactly what Kaz asked here, but to protect her Interviewer-ly credentials, I will not say what it was. I am also amused that she cut the bit in the "parents" section where I said something along the lines of "I tend not to mention the porn!"
So, thoughts, fellow bloggers? This has mostly made me want to blog more. Can you start NaNoBloMo (where you blog every day for a month) halfway through a month? Or is that wicked cheating?
<3
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-11-05 01:52 am (UTC)Whereas Livejournal seems to be to a much larger audience. Even when entries are friendslocked, it never seems as intimate and personal. I don't know if that comes down to the fact that I am not a teenager anymore and neither are the people whose journals I follow, or something about the site design, or what. But in general it feels like a lot more like the audience has turned from a really safe, nonjudgmental audience into a more temperamental, impersonal and sometimes judgy audience, and the type of things people write about has changed accordingly? It's like nobody wants to give too much of themselves away. With OpenDiary, the whole point was giving EVERYTHING away. It was for the really personal stuff that you couldn't share with anyone else comfortably. I don't think LJ is trying to be that, and if it is trying, I think it fails.
Honestly, I use LJ almost exclusively for fannish stuff. I mean, sharing and discussing and all that. But I don't feel close to people who are my LJ friends, or I mean, I sometimes do, like with you, but I feel close to you because of chatting in Campfire, you know? I would barely feel like I knew you if we only communicated through LJ, even if I read every word of every entry and commented on all of them. It's just not a very intimate place at all. To my eyes.