An inquiry about LiveJournal culture and Mutual Friends
Here's a question for anyone and everyone with a Livejournal account to perhaps shed some light on for me. This has been nagging at me for quite some time now, but I've never QUITE cared enough about it to actually seek to understand it until last night as I was speaking to my friend BJ about the nature of LiveJournal, vis a vis friends and communities and such.
I frequently check out the user profiles of people who post interesting comments and such, just to get a sense of who they are and what their angle might be. And while doing so, I'll see these people with, like, THREE HUNDRED MUTUAL FRIENDS. And I just sort of squint in astonishment, asking myself a number of questions:
1) How in the world can they be interested in the personal minutiae of THIS many people?
2) Why are three hundred people interested in the journal of a person who apparently only posts about the personal minutiae of their own lives?
3) Is this just some sort of etiquette issue I'm unaware of, where one person friends you, and you just feel compelled to friend them back, regardless of whether or not you're interested in what music they're currently listening to or what cute thing their little sister just did?
I'm just absolutely puzzled by this phenomenon. You'll look at my profile, and see my mutual friends list is teeny-tiny, and MOST of these are people I know personally, and most of my non-mutual friends are the blogs of authors and artists and such whose work I like. Even the list of communities I actually watch is rather slender. My friends list is utilitarian and sleek. So, I suppose the core of my question is, to you people with hundreds of LJ friends and indeed hundreds of mutual friends, what in the world is going on here, and what do you get out of it?
I frequently check out the user profiles of people who post interesting comments and such, just to get a sense of who they are and what their angle might be. And while doing so, I'll see these people with, like, THREE HUNDRED MUTUAL FRIENDS. And I just sort of squint in astonishment, asking myself a number of questions:
1) How in the world can they be interested in the personal minutiae of THIS many people?
2) Why are three hundred people interested in the journal of a person who apparently only posts about the personal minutiae of their own lives?
3) Is this just some sort of etiquette issue I'm unaware of, where one person friends you, and you just feel compelled to friend them back, regardless of whether or not you're interested in what music they're currently listening to or what cute thing their little sister just did?
I'm just absolutely puzzled by this phenomenon. You'll look at my profile, and see my mutual friends list is teeny-tiny, and MOST of these are people I know personally, and most of my non-mutual friends are the blogs of authors and artists and such whose work I like. Even the list of communities I actually watch is rather slender. My friends list is utilitarian and sleek. So, I suppose the core of my question is, to you people with hundreds of LJ friends and indeed hundreds of mutual friends, what in the world is going on here, and what do you get out of it?