All Shined Up

[ladygabrielle]

As the livejournal fad is once again in a growth cycle among my friends, and as I have been asked on more than one occasion about being listed on other people's friends pages, I've renovated my journal for that purpose. I'll even try to update it from time to time

Comments

[nakor]

I think it's odd that you both think that this method of communication signals a flaw in social relations, and that you understand its purpose: given the two possibilities:

1. You do understand how your friends use LiveJournal, and it's a bad way.
   
2. You don't understand how your friends use LiveJournal, but it may be a good way.
   

I'm surprised you have such confidence in the first. ("If there are two ways to interpret what I said, and one implies I'm an idiot, and the other doesn't, please assume I meant the other.") Come to think of it, how is this inferior to friends writing letters to one another? It's some neat infrastructure built on top of the idea that friends don't get to see each other often enough, so they write to one another (and some other ideas, yes). Nobody's advocating it, as far as I know, as a replacement for face to face conversation, private mail, or real-time mediated conversations like telephones or zephyr. Indeed, it is pretty awful at those. But for what it does do, why is a public journal bad?

Out of curiousity, would any of the following change your opinion of it?

1. No central infrastructure, everybody runs one on their own page/server. No "friends" pages are reasonably possible.
   
2. Friends-groups don't exist, there's just public/protected/private.
   
3. Protected and private posts don't exist, there's just public.
   
4. Public and private posts don't exist, everything must be posted to a particular friends-group.
   
5. Push instead of pull: messages show up via email, and you "friend" somebody by subscribing to their list. (And gosh do I wish it worked this way)
   
6. Comments are impossible.
   
7. Anonymity is impossible, everyone must register.
   
8. The pseudonym culture disappears, real names are used everywhere. This presumably takes most of the middle-school politics with it.
   
9. The "I need a new secret journal this week" culture disappears, lookups of journals are trivial if you know the person in real life. This presumably takes most of the high-school politics with it.
   
10. Universal WikiWikiEditing: anybody can edit any post or any comment, though this may be tagged with their username.
    

[ladygabrielle]

I'm unclear on the argument here. On the one hand, you're saying that I both understand the purpose of livejournal for at least some of my friends and think it's bad. Yet simultaneously draw the conclusion that I must not understand the purpose for which my friends use livejournal because it would be absurd for me to understand and think it's bad.

Regardless of how you want to resolve this contradiction, the fact is that I do understand some of the purposes for which my friends use livejournal. Some of these I even agree with. I'm reasonably in favor of using livejournal as a sounding board for ideas, and to that end I disagree with you on the point about "secret journals" being high school politics. I quite support the idea of being able to get feedback specifically from people one doesn't know, though livejournal is not good at fostering that sort of thing.

However, I disapprove of livejournal as a means for keeping up with what's going on in other people's lives. It's a quick, easy, incredibly impersonal way of telling people what's up. People may not be advocating using it in lieu of more personal communication, but it is nonetheless taking on that function, and people are generally condoning that. But you know, if someone's important enough to you that you want them to know what's going on in your life, then you should put in the time and effort to tell them directly.

So, in my opinion, this use of livejournal is indicitive of a problem in social relations. It's in effect saying that it's ok to not put in the time and effort of more personal forms of contact. And it echoes to me of a brief description a teacher once gave me of the theme of One Hundred Years of Solitude: we're as a society moving in the direction of not knowing how to really talk to each other. And yes, there's only faint traces of that conclusion that can be drawn from livejournal, but I think any step in that direction is tragic.