"The Sun Was Up For Far Too Long Today"
I’ve been gone too long, I think.
Life got too busy and too complicated to write about, and that’s never good, and consequently everything has seemed, at best, semi-real. Sometimes things only feel solid in the fingers once they’ve been set in words, especially given the appalling state of my memory and its continuing steep grade of decline.
I missed LiveJournal. I still visit my Friends feed daily, because I actually use it as my RSS reader (and oh, how sweet it was when Google Reader was discontinued; how I laughed at those who’d called me mad at the university!), but I haven’t added any entries for almost two years, and not regularly for far longer.
I know that LJ was widely viewed as a social media platform, and is now considered (well, except in Russia) a long-irrelevant one. I never saw it that way. To me, it’s a journaling platform with social hooks. Sure, you can share with friends, and yes, you can join and create communities, which is all well and good, but you can also just write. “It’s like a journal that other people can read,” not “it’s a social media sharing thingy that’s set up like a journal.”
The focus is on the words themselves, the entries. The entries are treated as history, as testament; never as ephemera. By contrast, for example, Twitter is a stream you can jump into and out of whenever you see fit, but even though individual tweets continue to exist, it all seems to wash away in the unrelenting press of time. LiveJournal lends entries a sense of permanence, which is nice even if it’s illusory. I like writing things that feel like they’re going to stick around for a while, and frankly, I don’t really care all that much who else reads them. And sure, there’s the goofy social media sugar on top, like the userpics and the virtual gifts and the mood icon sets, but they always felt like cute dessert on LiveJournal, whereas other platforms would serve them up as dinner.
So maybe I’m back to LiveJournal, the only “social media platform” that ever really spoke to me. I can write things as long or as short as they want to be. I can write them just for me, or share them with as many or as few people as I want. The entries are anchored in time, but always editable. They can reside in a true context, grow into an accretion of something grounded and maybe surprising.
Maybe I’m back when the rest of the planet has long since moved on to Facebook and Twitter, traded longer and more private and more introspective entries for pokes and “READ THIS ARTICLE OMG” and vampire requests, shorter-than-SMS pithy insights calculated for maximum likes and retweets. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against Twitter and think it’s a terrific medium for what it does. (Facebook, on the other hand, is crap, and the few things it’s good for aren’t worth the evil.) But I still have a need for a place where I can wallow in my own words, perhaps with six other people who understand the perspective. For a while I thought Tumblr might fill the LiveJournal gap, but it’s too focused on reblogs and notes instead of original entries. Ello isn’t even out of beta and it already feels like it’s peaked, and it definitely doesn’t feel like a place to unspool a few hundred words about the state of one’s life.
Maybe I’m back.