#imsleepynow

As you can probably tell if you scroll down this blog, the word for this post is 'desire.'

I was trying to think about what I could relate this word to in relation to publics and publishing, and I decided to tweet about my difficulty.

Coincidentally, the media research I was doing at the time was about the 'imagined audience' and the impact of Twitter in relation to the concept of audience in general.

Before I could send my tweet, a thought came to me. If a social media platform such as Twitter has a lack of defined audience and space, doesn't that come as a result of a lack of control in terms of what is being published and who is publishing it?

Many users of Twitter have claimed they do it as a 'live diary' or as a way of personally sharing their feelings or opinions outside of their private lives. This indicates a desire (see what I did there) to use online platforms of communication to escape the agony that is face to face conversation. 

However, ironically, as they publish their stories as a means of freeing a private identity, they are making their thoughts publically available to essentially the whole world. 

This demonstrates that the human desire to have the ability to publish anything they want, results in the consequence of having no control over what is published, who is viewing the published material and having absolutely no three dimensional social life.

The only way you could possibly, even remotely control your publishing is through the use of the "#" button, which categorises tweets into topic streams.

But don't get me started on the precious hashtag - a phenomenon, which in my opinion, was killed by Facebook.

A quote to end my rambling, I guess it kinda relates to publishing in some way: