White Star Line
LiveJournal. Facebook. What are we doing and why? Blog articles on this by Keith (alias bristolian_kam) and his friend Al (a.k.a. alastaire, my dear Watson), along with the comments on each, have proved highly thought provoking. These are issues that matter to me and demand reflection and response.
I was an LJ reader and commenter before I was an LJer. This was me (what a reception), and this (one of a number there that autumn), and this was me too. As those comments suggest, there were people on LiveJournal I was getting to know, or hoped to get to know. In fact, being accepted in December 2003 for the Knightmare RPG filming the following April, I was aware that many of the other participants were active LJers. It would have been too easy to sign up and suck up; so I convinced myself of a genuine desire to blog, and demonstrated it (more to myself than to others) by making entries for a while before adding any LJ Friends. I acknowledge all this in my first entry, and my LJ's original title hinted at the scope of its intended audience. To want particular friends and to get them makes me a lucky sod, and to be able to enrich those friendships via a typing-stuff-in-boxes website has made LiveJournal worthy of my loyalty.
Many moons later, the ups and downs of my life and LiveJournal are too numerous to waste your time with at this point, but I am still finding things I want to say, and want to say here. My entries are too haphazardous to constitute a 'voice'. Answering Al's question, I do believe that my true personality is here, though I may not be projecting it. My journal is a place of contradiction: I like the idea of people I don't know finding it (and quietly thinking good of me after reading it), but wouldn't want anyone but friends to connect it with my other activities online, or indeed offline.
The waning of LiveJournal is now impossible to ignore. And alongside it, the rise of Facebook. Anyone who has disappeared from my LJ Friends Page can invariably be found there. None of them has blogged of a conscious decision to forsake one for the other, but none of them has blogged to the contrary. If you are one of the aforementioned lapsed LJers, just know that I miss you, wonder why you've gone quiet, and hope that you will be back if it is what you want. But this isn't about you: it's about me and LiveJournal and Facebook. Al too sees a link between the two sites' fortunes, and reading his article left me with the uneasy sense of being on a sinking ship. A big, grand ship that many must have imagined was unsinkable. But it collided with a Zuckerberg.
I have lots of negative stuff to say about Facebook. Indeed, lots I already have said. 'I have, as far as I know, at least a couple of LJ Friends who aren't on Facebook. And I admire them for it. For all its good points, it's a vortex of exhibitionism and nonsense, where the concepts of friendship and even liking are diluted and distorted; a place fuelled by the premise that our verbal diarrhoea doesn't stink.' '[I fear] that being a Facebook user is not unlike King Hamlet's ghost, haunting people who would rather just soliloquise. It is add you, add you, remember me.' (As opposed to the line quoted by Al from the same play?) '[I sometimes wish I could throw it] off a cliff with the words "I'll never play this game". Facebook = Prattle Royale.' Crucially, excruciatingly, it is a place where people feel encouraged to talk more than to listen. LiveJournalism hasn't always been a gambol through the meadows, but Farcebook and devaluation seem to go hand in hand. A group becomes a crowd, and sometimes in a crowd we are so glad to belong that we forget our power to (de)value and be (de)valued, and maybe that is the essence of the damage that Facebook does. Y writes a comment to X - a friend whom Y has known for years, opened his house to, shared holidays with - and X ignores Y. What the f*ck is that all about? Sadly it's in keeping with a cybercesspit where you have to fight to be remembered as a real friend, to find a way to shine out of the haystack without presenting others with a prick. (Hence 'poking', I suppose.) 'Social media? Selfish media' summates Al. Social networking? Soshallow, notworking. Maybe one day I will learn how to play the game, be it through desire or necessity, but at this time I am not keen.
Those of you who get more out of FB than I do might like to consider the following in relation to your own list of Facebook friends. 'There is a limit on the number of people we can hold in mind and have a meaningful relationship with. That number is about 150 and is set by the size of your brain.' (Source: Professor Robin Dunbar, Is Facebook good for friendship?, The Times' Eureka magazine, March 2011.) Might a politer yet literal rendering of Lord Fear's parting line be applicable? We may, then, get still more out of FB by being honest about how we use it now, and whether it is in fact using us.
Back to my LJ then. I do not wish to start another blog elsewhere because, while I must accept that it is natural for others to shed their skins (or if that sounds too pejorative, to change their clothes), for me it would just feel untidy. And as I said, I want to be loyal to LiveJournal. Yet my entries are, on the whole, a bit rubbish. Misdirected conviction, faltering wit, and sentences that don't know how to flow, be they overwrought or underwrought. I blog because I want to, because I do get sufficient positive feedback to justify it, and because as long as I read other people's entries it is important that I reciprocate. But what is as true now as when I started is that for me LJing is not so much about entries as about comments.
If I care about your journal, which is impossible unless I sense that you care about it too, you know that I am as likely to leave a comment on an entry from five years ago as an entry from five days ago. Old entries stay in my memory and it just feels natural to me to reconnect with any moment whenever I discover or rediscover meaning in it. Much of the best of me is not in my journal but in my comments. I can be open yet still intimate, personal yet comfortably public. And I can make a difference. 'That was me, being forthright, being articulate, being meaningful, being secure that, at least some of the time, my efforts were being appreciated. I felt enriched, endorsed, likeable, and nothing can quite take away my gratitude,' I said in one particular LJ comment, reflecting on some of the 999 that I had made before it. 'Let’s face it. LiveJournal is still alive, and the nostalgic appeal still burns. But that’s it: nostalgia,' writes Keith. That's not how I see it. Whatever I say to friends on LJ, wherever I say it, is present me reaching out to present you. I am confident that it is received that way. Maybe it's not irrelevant that I took the word 'nostalgia' out of my website's name and put a personal sentiment in its place.
Recently I left some thoughts for a friend in an LJ comment. One of those thoughts could easily have been taken for the pedestrian wordplay that it was, but ended up unexpectedly being, for want of a better term (or perhaps not), retweeted on Facebook. I quite enjoyed the gratification of being pimped (please don't quote me on that), but also important is what this says about the websites involved. I could have made the comment on Facebook in the first place, knowing how many friends-of-friends might see it, but I chose to give it on LJ. I talk better here; friends listen better. The other social networking shites win on breadth, but LiveJournal at its best is a triumph of depth. I don't see that changing quite yet, and I will be doing what I do to help ensure it doesn't. It's too much to lose.
'I believe, and want it to be true, that whatever I say or do on Facebook, the Tesco of the web, my mind and my heart are still to be found here, not there.' If this is a sinking ship, it's not sinking nearly as fast as some may think; and for now, I am proud to be among the band playing on in the First Class Lounge. Come aboard and listen any time you like. I will listen to you too.
David
I was an LJ reader and commenter before I was an LJer. This was me (what a reception), and this (one of a number there that autumn), and this was me too. As those comments suggest, there were people on LiveJournal I was getting to know, or hoped to get to know. In fact, being accepted in December 2003 for the Knightmare RPG filming the following April, I was aware that many of the other participants were active LJers. It would have been too easy to sign up and suck up; so I convinced myself of a genuine desire to blog, and demonstrated it (more to myself than to others) by making entries for a while before adding any LJ Friends. I acknowledge all this in my first entry, and my LJ's original title hinted at the scope of its intended audience. To want particular friends and to get them makes me a lucky sod, and to be able to enrich those friendships via a typing-stuff-in-boxes website has made LiveJournal worthy of my loyalty.
Many moons later, the ups and downs of my life and LiveJournal are too numerous to waste your time with at this point, but I am still finding things I want to say, and want to say here. My entries are too haphazardous to constitute a 'voice'. Answering Al's question, I do believe that my true personality is here, though I may not be projecting it. My journal is a place of contradiction: I like the idea of people I don't know finding it (and quietly thinking good of me after reading it), but wouldn't want anyone but friends to connect it with my other activities online, or indeed offline.
The waning of LiveJournal is now impossible to ignore. And alongside it, the rise of Facebook. Anyone who has disappeared from my LJ Friends Page can invariably be found there. None of them has blogged of a conscious decision to forsake one for the other, but none of them has blogged to the contrary. If you are one of the aforementioned lapsed LJers, just know that I miss you, wonder why you've gone quiet, and hope that you will be back if it is what you want. But this isn't about you: it's about me and LiveJournal and Facebook. Al too sees a link between the two sites' fortunes, and reading his article left me with the uneasy sense of being on a sinking ship. A big, grand ship that many must have imagined was unsinkable. But it collided with a Zuckerberg.
I have lots of negative stuff to say about Facebook. Indeed, lots I already have said. 'I have, as far as I know, at least a couple of LJ Friends who aren't on Facebook. And I admire them for it. For all its good points, it's a vortex of exhibitionism and nonsense, where the concepts of friendship and even liking are diluted and distorted; a place fuelled by the premise that our verbal diarrhoea doesn't stink.' '[I fear] that being a Facebook user is not unlike King Hamlet's ghost, haunting people who would rather just soliloquise. It is add you, add you, remember me.' (As opposed to the line quoted by Al from the same play?) '[I sometimes wish I could throw it] off a cliff with the words "I'll never play this game". Facebook = Prattle Royale.' Crucially, excruciatingly, it is a place where people feel encouraged to talk more than to listen. LiveJournalism hasn't always been a gambol through the meadows, but Farcebook and devaluation seem to go hand in hand. A group becomes a crowd, and sometimes in a crowd we are so glad to belong that we forget our power to (de)value and be (de)valued, and maybe that is the essence of the damage that Facebook does. Y writes a comment to X - a friend whom Y has known for years, opened his house to, shared holidays with - and X ignores Y. What the f*ck is that all about? Sadly it's in keeping with a cybercesspit where you have to fight to be remembered as a real friend, to find a way to shine out of the haystack without presenting others with a prick. (Hence 'poking', I suppose.) 'Social media? Selfish media' summates Al. Social networking? Soshallow, notworking. Maybe one day I will learn how to play the game, be it through desire or necessity, but at this time I am not keen.
Those of you who get more out of FB than I do might like to consider the following in relation to your own list of Facebook friends. 'There is a limit on the number of people we can hold in mind and have a meaningful relationship with. That number is about 150 and is set by the size of your brain.' (Source: Professor Robin Dunbar, Is Facebook good for friendship?, The Times' Eureka magazine, March 2011.) Might a politer yet literal rendering of Lord Fear's parting line be applicable? We may, then, get still more out of FB by being honest about how we use it now, and whether it is in fact using us.
Back to my LJ then. I do not wish to start another blog elsewhere because, while I must accept that it is natural for others to shed their skins (or if that sounds too pejorative, to change their clothes), for me it would just feel untidy. And as I said, I want to be loyal to LiveJournal. Yet my entries are, on the whole, a bit rubbish. Misdirected conviction, faltering wit, and sentences that don't know how to flow, be they overwrought or underwrought. I blog because I want to, because I do get sufficient positive feedback to justify it, and because as long as I read other people's entries it is important that I reciprocate. But what is as true now as when I started is that for me LJing is not so much about entries as about comments.
If I care about your journal, which is impossible unless I sense that you care about it too, you know that I am as likely to leave a comment on an entry from five years ago as an entry from five days ago. Old entries stay in my memory and it just feels natural to me to reconnect with any moment whenever I discover or rediscover meaning in it. Much of the best of me is not in my journal but in my comments. I can be open yet still intimate, personal yet comfortably public. And I can make a difference. 'That was me, being forthright, being articulate, being meaningful, being secure that, at least some of the time, my efforts were being appreciated. I felt enriched, endorsed, likeable, and nothing can quite take away my gratitude,' I said in one particular LJ comment, reflecting on some of the 999 that I had made before it. 'Let’s face it. LiveJournal is still alive, and the nostalgic appeal still burns. But that’s it: nostalgia,' writes Keith. That's not how I see it. Whatever I say to friends on LJ, wherever I say it, is present me reaching out to present you. I am confident that it is received that way. Maybe it's not irrelevant that I took the word 'nostalgia' out of my website's name and put a personal sentiment in its place.
Recently I left some thoughts for a friend in an LJ comment. One of those thoughts could easily have been taken for the pedestrian wordplay that it was, but ended up unexpectedly being, for want of a better term (or perhaps not), retweeted on Facebook. I quite enjoyed the gratification of being pimped (please don't quote me on that), but also important is what this says about the websites involved. I could have made the comment on Facebook in the first place, knowing how many friends-of-friends might see it, but I chose to give it on LJ. I talk better here; friends listen better. The other social networking shites win on breadth, but LiveJournal at its best is a triumph of depth. I don't see that changing quite yet, and I will be doing what I do to help ensure it doesn't. It's too much to lose.
'I believe, and want it to be true, that whatever I say or do on Facebook, the Tesco of the web, my mind and my heart are still to be found here, not there.' If this is a sinking ship, it's not sinking nearly as fast as some may think; and for now, I am proud to be among the band playing on in the First Class Lounge. Come aboard and listen any time you like. I will listen to you too.
David