(no subject)

[rivka]

I'm putting together a research proposal that, among other things, is going to involve an analysis of the emotional content of writing samples. I'm planning to use techniques that are developed by a Texas psychologist named James Pennebaker.

On his website, he's posted reprints of several of his research articles. I was scrolling through them, looking for titles which might be relevant to my study, when something I moused over brought up a URL in the status bar that contained the words "LiveJournal." Surprised, I looked up and saw the article title "Linguistic markers of psychological change surrounding September 11, 2001," and a note that they studied language use in 1000 LiveJournals for the period around September 11.

I felt an immediate surge of revulsion and violation. My stomach churned. All I could think was, "But I keep a LiveJournal." I was completely taken aback by the strength of the sense of utter violation.

It lasted until I got far enough into actually reading the article to realize that my LJ wasn't included in the sample. (They only included people who gave permission for their LJs to be spidered by web browsers. They didn't, however, individually ask people for permission to analyze their LJs.) Then it slowly subsided, especially as I realized that no one's journal was actually quoted. The negative emotions didn't dissipate entirely until I went on and read another article, a dry technical one.

Here's what I want to know: am I weird? Or does this seem like a violation of privacy, an intrusion, to anyone else?

Comments

Re: A thought

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Letters to the editor: no. People writing letters to the editor have their public presentation face on, and intend for the letter to be read by people who don't know them and don't give a damn about them.

Message board posts, well, it would depend. If it were a fairly impersonal board, like the ones some newspapers have, I would classify it in the "letters to the editor" category. If it were something that had become a close-knit community, I would feel that it was more of a personal intrusion.

I know that public LiveJournals are publicly available, and that anyone can read my public posts. That's clearly true in a technical sense. But it also seems obviously true to me that most people don't write their LJs for presentation to the general public - they write to an audience of people who know them. There's a difference between the technically possible audience and the expected/desired audience. I especially think that's true in moments of great grief and tragedy. People don't find themselves thinking, "anyone could read this" - they're reaching out to a community of people they know for support, and the public nature of the forum is only a dim consideration.