Journaling Survey

hot­tiewith­in post­ed this sur­vey in for a project she’s doing. I decid­ed to post my answers here.

1. Do you own a hard­copy jour­nal as well as your LiveJournal?
No.

2. How long have you been writ­ing in each of them? (Or just Live­jour­nal if you don’t have a hard­copy jour­nal.) What was your rea­son for start­ing a jour­nal, and has that rea­son changed over time?
I began my LJ on 5/12/02. I start­ed it on a whim because my part­ner was enjoy­ing it and it seemed like an inter­est­ing experiment.

3. How old are you now? (So I know when you start­ed journaling)
36.

4. What is your main rea­son for using Live­Jour­nal and/or your hard­copy journal?
I use it to keep in touch with friends, to vent, to work out things that are on my mind, and to save poems and such that I might want to refer to later.

5. Do you have any entries that are pri­vate? If so, why are they pri­vate (what do you write about? More per­son­al things, etc?)
I don’t have any that are pri­vate any­more. I did a very few, but went back and changed them so that my part­ner can read them. One pri­vate entry was a friends-only post that I did­n’t feel was quite coher­ent yet, and the oth­ers were large­ly notes to myself about oth­er things I want­ed to write about later.

6. Is there a dif­fer­ence in what you write in your Live­Jour­nal ver­sus your hard­copy jour­nal if you have one?
n/a

7. What is your main moti­va­tion for keep­ing a jour­nal online? What do you hope to achieve?
Right now, I enjoy the inter­ac­tion. I don’t hope to achieve any­thing, honestly.

8. Do you have mul­ti­ple jour­nals for var­i­ous top­ics, or do you include all top­ics you write about in one jour­nal? (For exam­ple, there are jour­nals of trav­el, jour­nals of con­science, jour­nals of per­son­al mem­o­ran­da, and pub­lic jour­nals where you would write about your dai­ly life.)
Nope, just the one.

9. When you are mak­ing entries for your Live­jour­nal, do you have a self-con­scious aware­ness of an audi­ence? Does this make you write dif­fer­ent­ly than you would if you did­n’t know you had an audience?
Hmmm. Well, I explain things that I would­n’t if I were only writ­ing in a pri­vate jour­nal. And I do use cus­tom fil­ter­ing at times depend­ing on the sen­si­tiv­i­ty of what I’m writ­ing about. For instance, our chil­dren have LJs, so if I write any­thing that I don’t wish them to read, I use a fil­ter that only includes the adults on my friends list. That’s about it, though.

10. Do you feel that you cen­sor a lot out of what you would real­ly like to say in your Live­Jour­nal entries because you know some­one else is going to read it? It has been said that “any­one who asks about a per­son­’s diary must accept the fact more is con­cealed than said.” Do you agree with this state­ment? Why or why not?
I don’t think I self-cen­sor much, oth­er than as not­ed in the pre­vi­ous ques­tion. I’m a fair­ly open per­son in most ways.

11. Is the fear that your life will be for­got­ten if you don’t write things down a part of your moti­va­tion for keep­ing an online and/or hard­copy journal?
No.

12. What is your moti­va­tion in read­ing oth­er peo­ple’s LiveJournals?
To keep in touch with friends, and get to know peo­ple I find intrigu­ing or inspir­ing better.

13. Also, where do you think the future of jour­nal­ing is going? What will be the next “phase”? Do you think video jour­nals will become pop­u­lar? Any oth­er ideas on this?
Hmm. It’s already tak­ing much of the same path that web pages took earlier—more and more peo­ple are start­ing them, com­pa­nies are begin­ning to get involved, there’s more com­mer­cial­iza­tion, etc. We’ll see many peo­ple drop off and lose enthu­si­asm, and some con­tin­ue to main­tain their blogs. We’ll see more com­mer­cial blogs, but I can’t hon­est­ly imag­ine why any­one would fol­low them. And I would­n’t both­er to look at a video journa—I sel­dom view video clips. I’m more text-oriented.