I shall take this bait on this birthday.
Much coalesces around this. I type this as I listen to Caravan Palace, a band I discovered at my friend's Austin's birthday party (electro swing, as it is called - although I prefer my term of "crime funk") during my own birthday.
My birthdays have been less celebratory these past years, although not any less enjoyable or fun. It's just simply that, typically, most birthdays are taken up with either work or other such real life silliness. Today was mostly me enjoying a day off reading a few RPG nerdy things, cleaning a little, updating some DnD games online, buying myself a fancy-ish beer from the local craft liquor store and drinking it, and mailing a few things while getting printer ink for antiquehighheel by biking down Howard. I don't have any complaints. It was a benign, if not mundane, day. Besides, I work this whole weekend and our recent Baltimore trip sapped monies to the point of having to be conservative for the next week.
I felt compelled to post on livejournal after.... five years? I actually check almost every day, as my wife still uses it along with a group of friends to read each other rather regularly. But what prompted me was suddenly seeing three friends of mine posting within a week of each other that haven't been seen in a year (at least) if not longer.
And that started me thinking... facebook has become the de facto communication tool of the internet medium, and that actually is a good thing ( I truly think). There are people I would not have interacted with without it. People I have "re"-connected with. And it has let me get in touch with those people I work with and actually spend most of my day with. And there are a lot of people I'm perfectly content seeing a tiny, blurb of update activity. I LIKE them, but... really. 124 characters is enough to keep me up to date on their lives.
But I do wonder at these group of people forced to encapsulate their lives into such a short burst. People are infinitely more complicated and irrevocably tend to wax much more than a short few sentences will allow. I see this at work. Younger people simply boiling down their emotions and lives into the bare minimum so as to keep everyone updated, but not really sharing anything of substance. The REAL stuff is kept submerged and well hidden. And for all an internet-medium's attempts to force people to share their likes and dislikes and loves and hates, we have a whole group of people that self-edit themselves because they know they are being watched by a large section of people that they are not really close to, even if they are told they are.
And that struck me, as I watched not one, not two, but THREE formerly prolific lj friends post and babble about personal life stuff within a week of each other. And I realized that they would never do so in a more public medium. And the reason they did so here was because lj was safe and the reason for THAT was because it was FORGOTTEN.
Unlike the ghettos of the real world, the ghettos of the internet provide freedom. It isn't a coincidence that Russia has adopted LJ.
I'm eager to see a reverse migration.
My birthdays have been less celebratory these past years, although not any less enjoyable or fun. It's just simply that, typically, most birthdays are taken up with either work or other such real life silliness. Today was mostly me enjoying a day off reading a few RPG nerdy things, cleaning a little, updating some DnD games online, buying myself a fancy-ish beer from the local craft liquor store and drinking it, and mailing a few things while getting printer ink for antiquehighheel by biking down Howard. I don't have any complaints. It was a benign, if not mundane, day. Besides, I work this whole weekend and our recent Baltimore trip sapped monies to the point of having to be conservative for the next week.
I felt compelled to post on livejournal after.... five years? I actually check almost every day, as my wife still uses it along with a group of friends to read each other rather regularly. But what prompted me was suddenly seeing three friends of mine posting within a week of each other that haven't been seen in a year (at least) if not longer.
And that started me thinking... facebook has become the de facto communication tool of the internet medium, and that actually is a good thing ( I truly think). There are people I would not have interacted with without it. People I have "re"-connected with. And it has let me get in touch with those people I work with and actually spend most of my day with. And there are a lot of people I'm perfectly content seeing a tiny, blurb of update activity. I LIKE them, but... really. 124 characters is enough to keep me up to date on their lives.
But I do wonder at these group of people forced to encapsulate their lives into such a short burst. People are infinitely more complicated and irrevocably tend to wax much more than a short few sentences will allow. I see this at work. Younger people simply boiling down their emotions and lives into the bare minimum so as to keep everyone updated, but not really sharing anything of substance. The REAL stuff is kept submerged and well hidden. And for all an internet-medium's attempts to force people to share their likes and dislikes and loves and hates, we have a whole group of people that self-edit themselves because they know they are being watched by a large section of people that they are not really close to, even if they are told they are.
And that struck me, as I watched not one, not two, but THREE formerly prolific lj friends post and babble about personal life stuff within a week of each other. And I realized that they would never do so in a more public medium. And the reason they did so here was because lj was safe and the reason for THAT was because it was FORGOTTEN.
Unlike the ghettos of the real world, the ghettos of the internet provide freedom. It isn't a coincidence that Russia has adopted LJ.
I'm eager to see a reverse migration.