It’s really not rational, so let’s start with that 🙂
People have different reasons for what they do, so there is no one singular answer. Some people use bookmarks as a “to read” this. Some of them use bookmarks as a “recommendations” list. Some use them to keep track of fics in other ways.
Making a bookmark private could be because it’s smut and the reader doesn’t want other people to know they read smut. Or it could be because they haven’t read the fic yet so they don’t want it out there that they will. Or it could be because they describe fics in order to be able to find them later and they don’t want anyone to read the spoilers they included.
I’ll pass it off to the readers to give other reasons for private bookmarks, but know that someone talking shit is probably not the reason.
It’s odd to me that our default assumption seems to be that people would make their bookmarks public. Like, to the extent that keeping them private requires some kind of explanation. Personally, I might expect the default assumption go the other way: that most people would want to keep their list of fics they’d like to find again just for their own reference, and that people who make their bookmarks public are doing curatorial work above and beyond what’s expected.
I mean, I say this as someone who shares a lot online about what I’m reading. I liveblog my pleasure reading, and I also write up more formal recommendations of both published books and fic. But all of this is very conscious mediation. It’s much different, and in ways less transparent, than publishing lists of things I’m reading, or lists of things I’d like for whatever reason to be able to find again, with no comment or explanation. Which is not to say that some people don’t want to do this or that it’s not valuable! I enjoy browsing the public bookmarks (or home bookshelves) of people whose taste I like, too. But why do we expect this behavior, or service, as a standard part of fic-reading?
I’ve actually been thinking about issues like this a lot this past week, ever since I saw a Tumblr screen-shot of a tweet by Roxane Gay, which was “liked” by Hillary Clinton. (This is presumably in reference to the disparaging reactions to Gay’s previous tweet at DC Comics, offering to write their Batgirl movie, although there might be other or different context I’m not aware of):
[For those who can’t see this image, Gay’s tweet says “A lot of men I will never know are deeply invested in my career. I am touched.” The image then shows the check mark which means that Clinton “liked” the tweet.]
My first reaction to this was, like most people’s, amusement: certainly if anyone understands the investment of unknown sexists in one’s career, it’s Clinton. But then I had a further reaction, which was one of total exhaustion. Imagine living so much in the public eye that you can’t “like” something on Twitter without people screenshotting your “like” and circulating it to hundreds of thousands of comments on social media. This isn’t a tweet Clinton wrote herself, or even someone else’s tweet that she decided to retweet. All she did was click a “like” button, possibly in a moment of passing amusement and camaraderie.
[Edit: apparently the check-mark is actually a more reblog-like marker of endorsement on Clinton’s part, SORRY Y’ALL, I DON’T TWEET. A more germane example might be the furore over JK Rowling “liking,” and then publicly disavowing her “like” of, a transphobic tweet recently. I’m less in sympathy with Rowling’s politics, which I think are well-meaning but shallow and kind of cowardly; but this still highlights a reason that someone in the public eye might be well-advised to compose their public online record more carefully, and with more context.]
I’m not particularly shedding tears for Hillary Clinton’s lost privacy. Pretty much everything about her life demonstrates that she chooses emphatically to live in the public eye, and she has faced many worse dragons than screenshots of a “like” on a wryly anti-sexist tweet. She no doubt knew the likely repercussions of “liking” that tweet, and did it as a show of solidarity for Gay. But what I’m reacting to here is the assumption that we all, by default, owe each other a transparent record of what we do online, and that if we choose privacy over transparency, that choice requires an explanation.
Maybe this assumption is just realistic, I don’t know. I know it’s unwise to assume anything you do online will definitely remain secret. But there’s a difference between accepting the possibility that one’s browser history might maliciously be leaked to one’s employer, and accepting the mandate of absolute transparency to all people one interacts with online. This is an inexact metaphor, but to me it bears certain similarities to closing the blinds before you undress: sure, some people might choose not to do it, and sure, there are voyeurs out there who will try to get an eyeful even if you do close them, but that doesn’t mean that the decision to close them itself is weird or in need of justification.
(Tangentially, this also brings up interesting questions of expectations of “authenticity” in online spaces. Say I used my AO3 bookmarks as a list, not of my favorite fics, but of, say, stories I found troubling in one way or another. One might suppose I was working on an article about my relationship to some particular trope, and wanted to collect some fics for help cataloguing my own reactions. Say I kept my bookmarks public but didn’t explain this strategy to anyone. Would people familiar with my taste, who sought out my public bookmarks, be justified in feeling misled by me? Would they be justified in asking me to explain the discrepancy? Who “owns” the public bookmarks space, and what does the bookmarker owe the people who may seek it out?)
this was a fascinating read – thanks for the addition!
Question of Smoke 