One of the most common concerns in this era of online social networking is personal privacy.  What level of detail is appropriate to post online?  The concepts of public and private, including personal privacy, are increasingly fluid, mediated, and actively managed.

Social media systems have developed a wide variety of ways to deal with this phenomenon.  At the moment, the best-known of these is Facebook, but another social software system - LiveJournal, a hybrid blog and social networking site - has featured extensive access controls for ten years.  Like nearly every other social media site, LiveJournal relationships are built around “friendship”; on LiveJournal, the “friends list” also serves as the foundation for the system’s extensive privacy controls.  Every LiveJournal post can be public, accessible only to the Friends List (“Friends Locked”), private, or accessible to a subset of the Friends List (a “filter”).  It is in the filters that the power of the LiveJournal system really lies; LiveJournal users can create as many of these subgroups as they want to, and can include as many or as few of their LiveJournal friends in those groups.  Thus, the number of LiveJournal “publics” is effectively infinite. 

Because these access controls have been a part of the LiveJournal system since its infancy, it is assumed that LiveJournal users will use these features to manage access to their personal content. In a survey of 600 LiveJournal users, 90% used Friends Lock and 75% used filters at least monthly; LiveJournal has a culture of locking.  While use of these features is common, even expected, among LiveJournal users, the reasons that people limit access to their content, and the types of material and audiences they protect, vary.  LiveJournal users conceptualize access to their content either inclusively or exclusively.  They either invite an audience into an intimate sphere, offering up access to personal content, or they use the software to create walls around their personal content and keep particular audience members out.

In both the exclusive and the inclusive conceptions of access, users consider access along the dimensions of content and audience.  LiveJournal bloggers who think about access exclusively frequently lock specific people out of their journals; these are most often former lovers, family members, and coworkers.  They also prevent specific readers or “the general public” from seeing potentially identifying information and sexually explicit content.  Inclusive access, on the other hand, is an invitation into the author’s personal Internet space.  Posts about a particular interest or hobby may be  filtered to be visible only to readers who share that interest; posts containing sexually explicit material or controversial opinions are filtered to an audience deemed able to handle that type of content.  At the intersection of audience and content dimensions lies the personal content that is shared with close friends.  Definitions of “personal” and “close” are, much like the reconceptualized categories of public and private, sites of extreme fluidity.

This fluidity extends beyond just definitions of terms, however.  A number of LiveJournal users surveyed apply both the exclusive and inclusive conceptions of access to their material, depending on the audience, the content, and their mood at the time of writing.  Audience rights are also fluid; any individual may be added to or dropped from the LiveJournal Friends List or a filter at any time.  Finally, the access controls placed on an individual LiveJournal post or the entire document may be changed at any given time.  A reader who had access to a post on one day may find the next that they can no longer see it. Beyond facilitating the creation of an infinite number of “publics”, the LiveJournal system allows those publics to change over time.

LiveJournal is just one site within a larger social sphere, both online and off, that these individuals inhabit.  The ways that LiveJournal users negotiate and play with access to personal information, the ways that they engage with public and private in the online social space, inform and are informed by a broader change in conceptions of public and private.  The techniques that they use online are techniques that are also used as they navigate an offline world where the categories of public and private are increasingly fluid.

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Sarah M. Ford is a PhD Candidate in Sociology; University of Massachusetts, Amherst.