BLOGGING AND PUBLIC/PRIVATE

Given the personal nature of many blogs, i'm often asked why bloggers put so much material out for the public to see. If you haven't visited lately, go to the local mall or any popular teen hangout in your hometown. Feel yourself twitch at the sight of teens romping around in contemporary fashion which shows off much bare skin. Teen fashion has always given adults heart attacks. Why do teens parade around in such costumes? The reason is very similar to why bloggers put material out there. A huge part of identity development is performing for the public in order to experience reactions. You figure out the barriers, you work out what is acceptable. This is how you learn the rules of social interaction.
While this behavior is most visible amongst teens, aspects of it are prevalent in adult culture as well. In particular, think about times when you were frustrated with your boss, partner or children. Have you ever created little experiments just to see how someone would react? Tested the boundaries by doing something that was "not you"? This is part of the same psychology.
Blogs let people work through identity issues by testing things out, but giving them a mirror in which to reflect on their own performance.
Additionally, social performance games help us find like minds. We see this in everyday life too. In BDSM subcultures, handkerchiefs that signal sexual proclivities have been around a long time. If you don't know what a particular handkerchief means, that's fine - it wasn't meant for you anyhow. But even outside of subcultural signals, our dress codes and mannerisms convey a lot about us and i'm sure you've used those cues even here to find people who might share your interests and values.
Many bloggers want to find others who have something in common. They want serendipitous interactions. They perform as digital flaneurs, to see and be seen. They want to be public. But only so public.
Unfortunately, most people's model of what it means to be public comes from the public square. We know when we can be overheard in the park, but that's ok. If someone joins in, perhaps they have something valuable to say. And perhaps we'll speak just a wee bit louder than we need to in order to encourage that. But in the public park, we know the risks and we know how to make certain that the wrong people don't overhear.
The problem is that the web is not the public park. Thanks to persistence and search-ability, there are multiple degrees of public-ness. And then, of course, thanks to PATRIOT, there are unannounced voyeurs. People are not accustomed to this - how do we perform for unknown audiences or to be overheard years from now or by people that we can't see? This is not part of our mental model. We don't have an understanding of what it means to speak to all people across all time at once. Or to speak to people we can't see or even imagine.
The typical response that i get is that we need to get over it, privacy is dead. We should teach bloggers that they are in public. But bloggers aren't naive - they know they're talking in public and they view the benefits of being public as more important than the risks. Honestly, the only way to really model the potential risks is through complete and utter paranoia. And frankly, who really wants to live like that? We simply do not have the cognitive models to really understand the heightened state of public-ness that we've created. It's not about knowing what it means to be public because it's not like any public we've seen before.
So what do we do? How do we learn to negotiate layered publics? This goes far beyond PATRIOT. It is not simply about the backdoors that governments want to install to spy on their people. It's about the ways in which people can negotiate multiple social contexts simultaneously. It's about learning how to manage invisible and potential audiences instead. It's about changing every social rule that we've learned since childhood.

SO WHY SHOULD LIBRARIANS CARE?
Blogging presents all sorts of interesting challenges that are relevant to librarians. The privacy issues are obvious and librarians have already set the stage through their response to PATRIOT. The question is - how do we go beyond resistance to political agendas and provide people with the necessary tools?
Beyond privacy, there are access issues. The flood of self-produced content is overwhelming, making it very difficult to navigate and find relevant or desired information. For the most part, search companies are banking on their technology to solve this access scaling problem. Unfortunately, their approach has severe limitations.
Currently, search companies do not handle inconsistent data types, make good sense out of metadata, understand the context in which information is produced, know how to handle temporally dependent data, or understand the difference between information and communication.
Bloggers have completely clogged page rank algorithms. As a result, i'm the top result on far too many things simply because i blogged about it once. Posts that i wrote in 1997 still receive daily comments because, in search, they are seen as just as significant as the post i wrote yesterday. I write about disconnected things but the algorithms collapse those items and seem to think that they are connected to each other. All of this makes no sense. While blog search tools have been on the market for years, this doesn't eliminate the problems in main search engines.
Blogs are seen as information instead of communication or identity production. This creates all sorts of peculiarities about trust and reputation. There is a difference between publishing something as original, thought-out work and performing your mental wanderings. I'm an academic - i do publish. But i don't see my blog as the same as my academic works. Yet, whenever you search for topics that i research, my blog comes up long before my published work, mostly because publishers have tried so hard to lock down this material behind walled gardens.
Search has a tendency to flatten all sorts of contexts. Think back at when Deja came out to search all of Usenet. Suddenly, a very intimate conversation about the Gaza Strip in soc.culture.israel is seen on the same page as alt.politics. Those two groups assume very different intentions, but search says that they are equally important and relevant. This is even more visible when you are searching for people. Suddenly, conversations that you're having in alt.sex.bondage and comp.lang.perl are connected. How do you expect people to work on impression management when they cannot maintain social boundaries?
Blog access is faced with this dilemma as well - how do you actually provide context and meaning? How do you deal with the removal of temporal information? How do you explain that a post was intended for an audience when search introduces an entirely different one? How do you negotiate audiences who don't understand your intended context?
Yesterday, a stranger found my blog through a search for Kanye West. The anonymous commenter decided to tell me that i was just an "ignorant freeloader who [relies] on some b.s. 'slave story' that [my] grandmommy told [me] about her grandmommy." Having become accustomed to such comments, i just ignored this. But suddenly, all of my blog readers who know me and come to my blog because they agree with me got offended and a flame war began. How can we create safe space for conversation? Social walls have value in letting people know the context in which they are speaking.
Many of the problems presented by blogs are not new - they're simply bigger and more visible. But technology is not solving this problem. These are social information issues, not technological ones.

REMIX CULTURE
There's another aspect of blogging that i think is critical and that has to do with its distribution power. Because blogs are networked identity productions, memes spread fast. Things that are of value to one person get replicated on blog after blog and it becomes a huge distribution channel. This has great implications for information distribution, but there's a component of this that is currently under attack. And that is remix culture.
Remix has been around a long time in lots of different forms. There's the above ground forms such as edited book collections and CD compilations, but there are also underground forms. Like blogs, underground remix is primarily about communication and identity production. Underground remix occurs when you take cultural elements from one source and mix it up with other sources to produce something expressive. Fan fiction is a form of remix where people write new narratives using well-known cultural characters such as Harry Potter or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. One form of musical remix involves taking recordings of political statements, slicing them up and mixing them on top of musical tracks to make a particular message. For example, the Rx has just released a new song called "White Lines" that remixes commentary by George W. Bush into a song preaching the wonders of cocaine. Remix includes every form of media, from pictures to movies, text to audio. Remix allows people to express themselves.
People often assume that remix is simply an artistic production that abuses copyright. Rather than seeing remix as bi-products of cultural consumption, we turn their creators into artists. Honestly, was yesterday's remix of "It's the End of the World" art? I would argue that remix is primarily about communication. Remix lets people react to culture and politics, share their beliefs and find like minds.
Blogs serve as a massive distribution channel for remix. Do a search for "George Bush Don't Like Black People" and you'll see blog after blog sharing the link to the Legendary K.O.'s remix of Kanye West's statement and other commentary on the state of New Orleans. The problem with this is that blogs are not underground and their persistence puts this form of cultural communication at risk. Do you think that LITA got copyright permission from R.E.M.? What happens when a remix becomes very popular online? Those people run the risk of the attacks by copyright owners who think that they are destroying their property. Remix is cultural currency and blogs are distributors; they are engaged in acts of freedom of speech. But what if it isn't seen this way?

GOOGLE, BLOGGING AND REMIX - TYING IT TOGETHER
It wasn't so long ago that librarians were seen as pirates. How dare you let people take books for free? And make copies!?!? You are all a bunch of thieves!
Guess what? The search companies and bloggers are under the same attacks right now. The lawsuit against Google Print is breaking my heart. I spent years staring at my bookshelves, trying to practice witchcraft by screaming "grep" over and over again, praying that the right book would pop out. When Amazon first launched search inside a book during my final exams two years ago, i broke down crying. Finally i could find lost references and search the 700+ tombs scattered across my room. I begged every author i knew to make this service available on their books. And yet, two years have gone by and only about a tenth of my books are searchable. Why? Why? Why? We have the technology to do this but Google and Amazon are being called pirates and a thieves.
People have been using new media to communicate for as long as i can remember. In sixth grade, we gave mixed tapes for Valentine's Day. Did we think of ourselves as DJs? Certainly not! We were expressing our youthful perception of our relationship to our Valentine. Today, we are making our political values known, joking around with culture and collapsing the relationship between consumption and production. Technology is emerging to let us express ourselves through audio and video, to remix ourselves into culture. And yet, remixers everywhere are under attack because their acts have become too mainstream, too public. Technology has made culture far too visible, creating the best and worst kinds of voyeurs.
It is easy to stand back and say "not our problem" but search companies, bloggers and remixers are going through the same battle that librarians have had for years. I think about the librarians i know and the ones whose voices i read in the blogosphere. Librarians are some of the best spokespeople for civil liberties. Please, i beg you, don't turn your back on others engaged in the same information distribution activities as yourself. Google is not your enemy simply because it has capitalistic goals and is run by cocky boys with their machines. Remixers are not your enemy simply because they are primarily punk-ass kids. And bloggers are not your enemy simply because they have no shame in disagreeing impolitely in public. We all run by different rules but we all have the same goals in mind. My only request is that you don your eye-patch, practice your arrrr's and help protect the distribution of information in all its forms.