(no subject)
There's some discussion/reminiscence on Facebook about how LJ influenced/changed lives of many and what it was for them -- I got to catch up with what it meant, to be a US LJ user back in the day.
There's plenty of common with Russian LJ world: a safe place to be yourself, a place to find friends/people who think similarly, find information, etc.
Additional in the Russian LJ, I think, was that it was a place to think -- to have an opinion -- about anything, about everything. Some posted their observations, some -- funny sketches, or discussed politics (something I absolutely didn't care for at the time), or talked about books, movies, music, life. I don't know whether it's a post-Soviet-era mental freedom kind of effect or a side effect of Russian tendency to intellectualize but LJ for me back then was a marvelous delicious source to someone else's mind -- of a great amazing quality, as if everyone who posted (whom I followed) held it their personal responsibility to be truthful, precise, best in their attempt to say what they had.
Personally, LJ was a place for me to be. Just be. Mostly in words, of course, -- translations, poems, texts -- but a place free of pressing reality of survival which most of my Russian existence was about. I remember how every day I was thoughtfully nursing in my mind the next entry and was preparing to write it down like pianists perform: sit down in front of the keyboard, pause the hands over it for a second, breathe in.. and forget for a moment that anything else existed.
There's plenty of common with Russian LJ world: a safe place to be yourself, a place to find friends/people who think similarly, find information, etc.
Additional in the Russian LJ, I think, was that it was a place to think -- to have an opinion -- about anything, about everything. Some posted their observations, some -- funny sketches, or discussed politics (something I absolutely didn't care for at the time), or talked about books, movies, music, life. I don't know whether it's a post-Soviet-era mental freedom kind of effect or a side effect of Russian tendency to intellectualize but LJ for me back then was a marvelous delicious source to someone else's mind -- of a great amazing quality, as if everyone who posted (whom I followed) held it their personal responsibility to be truthful, precise, best in their attempt to say what they had.
Personally, LJ was a place for me to be. Just be. Mostly in words, of course, -- translations, poems, texts -- but a place free of pressing reality of survival which most of my Russian existence was about. I remember how every day I was thoughtfully nursing in my mind the next entry and was preparing to write it down like pianists perform: sit down in front of the keyboard, pause the hands over it for a second, breathe in.. and forget for a moment that anything else existed.