But let me just add that I recently discovered, quite by accident, that my beloved love-bug sweet-pea princess niece who just turned five is a bona fide Mean Girl. I witnessed this myself at the end of the pre-school year, on the very day she turned from four to five as a matter of fact — I went to her classroom’s birthday party and took photos, at this age it seems there are many extra adults helping out with classroom parties. Anyway. As folks got the classroom set up for the cake and presents all the preK children from all the preK classes had a half-hour recess in the gym. And they cut loose, little bodies flinging themselves around, dancing, running, basketballs bouncing, etc etc. And my little precious, as observed in this dynamics where no one even saw me tucked away with the teachers on the bleachers, wasn’t just a Mean Girl but *the* Mean Girl of the girls of this entire age set. She’s run zig-zag from one gym wall through all the bouncing basketballs and haphazard toddlers and preschoolers flailing about, and a single-file line of little girls would follow behind her, going whichever zig-zag way she led. But the meanness and cliqueness of the dynamics really shocked me when two teeny tiny girls — turns out they were just-turned-four-years-olds — wanted me to take their photo when they realized I’d been snapping shots of my niece running about. And so I turned toward these adorable little gals.

And at that point my niece and three other Mean Girls slinked — there is no other word that comes to mind to convey the way they deliberately, cooly slithered over as if these girls were prey, as if all this time they hadn’t noticed them or me or anything but just suddenly did and wanted to make sure the *right* girls got the camera’s attention — they came over to the bleachers and LoveBug barked at me, her aunt: “They’re Not in Our Age Group!” I shot her one glance and she turned back into the little doll we all love and adore at home. I made them *all* pose together for a group photo for me.

And when I developed it, there on the left end of the photo were the two enthusiastic 4-year-olds, clearly ecstatic to be in the same photo with the 5-year-old Mean Girls — but the entire whole of these little girls ALL being Mean Girls, there being plenty of other little girls who honestly didn’t even realize anything was going on over near the bleachers. My niece was in the middle and — I swear this is true — she and the very end Mean Girl Boy-Mad Thingy of the Clique flanking the right of the photo were shooting each other this look over the heads of the other clique girls inbetween them, I mean, the most self-satisfied, smug, heads-tilted-back eyes-narrowed look on their faces that said perfectly clearly:

Can You Believe We’re Letting These Two 4-Year-Old Losers Appear In this Photo With *Us* (the four 5-year-old Mean Girls) as Though They’re Part of Us?

It was all so shocking to me, I PMd elissa from the old boards about it. Myself, I had grown up oblivious to all of these dynamics — in fact, such ignorance of these dynamics is probably one of the *key* reasons I never was in the It clique in the first place — but it wasn’t just the dynamics, IT WAS THEIR AGE, HOW YOUNG IT ALL STARTED. It did not seem possible that such dynamics already were distinctly in place. And elissa, genius that she is, said of course this is the case, and that the truth of the matter is the human animal has to be socialized to be nice, not the other way around, and to share, for example, rather than take the lead and run away with it if she can and can set the rules for everyone else to follow, etc.

Oops. Sorry. I don’t know how I got so far out there. SEE! I *told* you you’ve all tapped in to something that obviously fascinates me and now I’m dying to get this book and go read this other blog etc……

You can actually do that with various levels of screening. You can screen a post so that it is only readable by whatever sub-group of your f-list you want to be able to read it. It just doesn’t have a formal designation like “acquaintances.”

Basically, “>create a custom friends group (just like you would do to filter your friends list).
Then, when you post an entry, select custom as the security level, and select the custom friends group that you created as the group who can see the post (a list of all your custom friends groups appears when you select custom).
It looks like you have to use the full update journal page to access this feature, rather than the “quick update” section of the “my LJ.”

Anyway, hope that makes sense and that you find it useful.

A fair number of people who are on my “friendslist” are really not people I think of as personal friends — they’re only people who write interesting stuff, and whose journals I therefore want to read. It sometimes makes me a little twitchy to know that they can also read my friends-locked posts; I just have to remind myself that I’m probably not important enough to them for what I say there to matter.

What I really wish LJ would do is either remove the “friends” terminology altogether, or implement a level between “friends” and “public”, where you could put people in that “I want to read what they write, but I don’t necessarily want to make them privy to everything I write” category. Call it “acquaintances”, perhaps.

Sorry, my use of the term was not defined as it might have been in an article intended for a wider reading audience than my livejournal usually gets. “Fandom” is the short-hand by which members of that subculture themselves - who comprise the majority of my readership - refer to their own subcultural milieu, so the idea of trying to define the term more specifically than that didn’t particularly occur to me while I was writing the post. Sorry for the confusion.

What’s fandom mean?