Moving forward from today, I think there will be a split in the private sector, because we will be able to delineate some of our mediated personal updates as private and some as public, the former of which is also different from the unmediated. So, we’d end up with public-mediated, private-unmediated, and the new private-mediated, which only reaches a certain audience (of most likely personal connections).

I’m really interested in this private-mediated space and might focus on part of it for my PhD work, if I get into a program for next year. I think that this area’s going to be the focal point toward which Internet studies trends in the next half-decade.

Cool project. I tend to consider the mourning of celebrities and other public figures a different creature since those feelings of sadness, however personal, cannot strictly speaking be individual. Those expressions are declarations of participation within a shared sentiment, an imagined community, if you will. Not to mention, their deaths are already, by their very nature, mediated events.

The more I think about it now, it seems that the backlash was not just about publicness, but about mediation. It was specifically about her tweeting the event, which then extended to her tweeting in general (with accusations that if she had spent more time with her son and less time tweeting, he wouldn’t have died). In other words, it wasn’t the sharing that was the problem, but the outlet. I wonder if in this present age, we’re beginning to graphic public/private more directly and explicitly upon mediated/unmediate (“IRL”).