Public/Private
I'm currently taking an online course through YALSA called New Technologies and New Literacies for Teens (scroll down).
I'm feeling engaged on a really deep level, I think because despite two years of library school (not to mention a looooong history of journaling about my personal life), this is the first time I'm getting to address in writing a lot of the really big issues that come up in the work that I do, and in the relationship between my work life and my "private" life.
In a discussion about teens and privacy (inspired, for once, not by the MySpace/predators business but by this article) one classmate mentioned her ambivalence about leaving personal traces of herself online in a world where that information becomes accessible to current and potential employers. I have been thinking and talking a lot lately about the politics of effacing (or concealing) my own personal life in deference to my professional life (which no doubt accounts for at least some of my absence from LJ).
My response to this classmate's post is behind the cut.
[name of classmate], I have been thinking a lot about the tension between public and private online. There is definitely a difference for me personally between what information I want my friends to know about me and what I want to share with all the people who come into contact with my online persona, including coworkers, library teens, and family members. However, I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea of living whatever parts of my life I live online in an exclusively formal register. I don't, after all, live my physical life that way: outside of work I utter the occasional swear word and wear (gasp) jeans, and it would be ludicrous and stifling and unhealthy to do otherwise.
As more of our lives get lived online (and this is where teens come in), it becomes less and less reasonable to expect anyone to "keep it clean." So maybe the thing to do is acknowledge that for a population whose personal, academic, family, and professional lives are all taking place in the same searchable universe, there are bound to be collisions between those lives. So if teens generally have a higher comfort level with those collisions than, say, I do, they are probably on the right track. Let's admit that there's something personal to be found online about each and every one of us and move on. I think it will be particularly interesting to watch the ettiquette that develops around this truth. I live in New York City, where our famed "coldness" is nothing more than a reaction to the truth of encountering overwhelming numbers of people and their intimate but extremely public details. And maybe the internet is a little like a city, and teens, as "digital natives" are in the process of developing a culture (or have developed one already) that incorporates the constant and easy availability of all manner of personal information.
Thoughts?
I'm feeling engaged on a really deep level, I think because despite two years of library school (not to mention a looooong history of journaling about my personal life), this is the first time I'm getting to address in writing a lot of the really big issues that come up in the work that I do, and in the relationship between my work life and my "private" life.
In a discussion about teens and privacy (inspired, for once, not by the MySpace/predators business but by this article) one classmate mentioned her ambivalence about leaving personal traces of herself online in a world where that information becomes accessible to current and potential employers. I have been thinking and talking a lot lately about the politics of effacing (or concealing) my own personal life in deference to my professional life (which no doubt accounts for at least some of my absence from LJ).
My response to this classmate's post is behind the cut.
[name of classmate], I have been thinking a lot about the tension between public and private online. There is definitely a difference for me personally between what information I want my friends to know about me and what I want to share with all the people who come into contact with my online persona, including coworkers, library teens, and family members. However, I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea of living whatever parts of my life I live online in an exclusively formal register. I don't, after all, live my physical life that way: outside of work I utter the occasional swear word and wear (gasp) jeans, and it would be ludicrous and stifling and unhealthy to do otherwise.
As more of our lives get lived online (and this is where teens come in), it becomes less and less reasonable to expect anyone to "keep it clean." So maybe the thing to do is acknowledge that for a population whose personal, academic, family, and professional lives are all taking place in the same searchable universe, there are bound to be collisions between those lives. So if teens generally have a higher comfort level with those collisions than, say, I do, they are probably on the right track. Let's admit that there's something personal to be found online about each and every one of us and move on. I think it will be particularly interesting to watch the ettiquette that develops around this truth. I live in New York City, where our famed "coldness" is nothing more than a reaction to the truth of encountering overwhelming numbers of people and their intimate but extremely public details. And maybe the internet is a little like a city, and teens, as "digital natives" are in the process of developing a culture (or have developed one already) that incorporates the constant and easy availability of all manner of personal information.
Thoughts?