(no subject)
Over at lj_biz, I just posted the following explanation of why I currently plan to leave LJ over this new tagging-others'-entries policy. It's philosophical, but at least it served to clarify my thinking.
The search for alternatives continues; my deepest thanks to those friends who have made suggestions. Can anyone tell me how to back up my journal here? Oh, what an enormous pain in the patookus this all is. Stupid conscience.
Anyway, the explanation:
I can accept the self-tagging as a concept, but for me the tagging by others changes the character of the LiveJournal community into something in which I fear I can no longer participate.
I’m willing to bet that my mild-mannered little journal, regulated by my own personal sense of public decorum, would never incur a tag. Yet I cannot say this policy will not affect me, because it wreaks a profound change on the nature of the LJ community members’ relationships to one another - it restructures who we are for each other in a deeply harmful way.
LJ’s current functions institutionalize benevolent behaviors. The blog invites us into self-declaration; the friends list invites us into relationship; commenting invites us into dialogue.
The function of tagging others’ entries as “inappropriate” to particular contexts, however, structures us to become not one another’s peers and dialogue partners, but one another’s judges. Worse, because in this medium we represent ourselves only by what we say, by giving others the power to dictate what we may say to whom, it gives the community power over our very existence in this medium. You have sanctioned others to have a potentially binding effect over what we get to say to whom, and thus to some extent over who we get to be to whom, on LJ.
You are institutionalizing a community relationship of judgment and existential restriction. This is not a relationship designed to bring out the grace in human nature, I assure you. In my opinion, it tends towards things like McCarthyism. It tends towards things like the USSR before glasnost and Maoist China in the days when the government encouraged “self-criticism.” It makes possible an online world of being informed on at any time by our neighbors. I read my 1984 (back when I was 16, by the way), and I know doubleplus ungood when I see it.
I thought it might interest you to know that this function of tagging others’ journals will cause someone like me, with my mild little posts about my 9-month-old daughter or my solar oven, to take my content elsewhere. It grieves me deeply to do so, but I cannot in good conscience be a party to this.
The search for alternatives continues; my deepest thanks to those friends who have made suggestions. Can anyone tell me how to back up my journal here? Oh, what an enormous pain in the patookus this all is. Stupid conscience.
Anyway, the explanation:
I can accept the self-tagging as a concept, but for me the tagging by others changes the character of the LiveJournal community into something in which I fear I can no longer participate.
I’m willing to bet that my mild-mannered little journal, regulated by my own personal sense of public decorum, would never incur a tag. Yet I cannot say this policy will not affect me, because it wreaks a profound change on the nature of the LJ community members’ relationships to one another - it restructures who we are for each other in a deeply harmful way.
LJ’s current functions institutionalize benevolent behaviors. The blog invites us into self-declaration; the friends list invites us into relationship; commenting invites us into dialogue.
The function of tagging others’ entries as “inappropriate” to particular contexts, however, structures us to become not one another’s peers and dialogue partners, but one another’s judges. Worse, because in this medium we represent ourselves only by what we say, by giving others the power to dictate what we may say to whom, it gives the community power over our very existence in this medium. You have sanctioned others to have a potentially binding effect over what we get to say to whom, and thus to some extent over who we get to be to whom, on LJ.
You are institutionalizing a community relationship of judgment and existential restriction. This is not a relationship designed to bring out the grace in human nature, I assure you. In my opinion, it tends towards things like McCarthyism. It tends towards things like the USSR before glasnost and Maoist China in the days when the government encouraged “self-criticism.” It makes possible an online world of being informed on at any time by our neighbors. I read my 1984 (back when I was 16, by the way), and I know doubleplus ungood when I see it.
I thought it might interest you to know that this function of tagging others’ journals will cause someone like me, with my mild little posts about my 9-month-old daughter or my solar oven, to take my content elsewhere. It grieves me deeply to do so, but I cannot in good conscience be a party to this.