All Shined Up
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
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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.
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