20 Years of LiveJournal
On December 11, 2003, I signed up for LiveJournal, with my very first post just barely making it in before midnight. I was induced to join by a great many of my friends who had joined this relatively new social media platform, back when social media was still an incredibly new concept that almost nobody understood. mokatz delivered the final blow that convinced me to join. I don't remember the details, but there's a pretty solid chance that the conversation was had by AOL Instant Messenger, which was the only chat program I had in that long era when most of my friends didn't even have cell phones yet.
My first few years of LiveJournal posts are mostly not particularly interesting to read after the fact. There was a lot of "how I am feeling" and "what I'm doing tomorrow" or "you should join me for this event," which never really worked, I might add. LiveJournal had a famous reputation for being drama city, and there was a little bit of that on my personal journal, although not much. There was a lot of weird experimentation as people figured out how social media worked, or how they wanted it to work. It's somewhat hard to believe as we look back twenty years, but in 2003 the open internet full of individual weirdness was still the many form, rather than the walled gardens that predominate today. The public internet in the form of web browsers was maybe ten years old, judging by 1em's recent "30th anniversary of writing HTML post, and like most ten-year-olds, there was a lot of immaturity and strangeness with occasional moments of deep clarity.
A little more than five years later, I joined Facebook. Most of the weird one-liners and moments in time moved there, and then eventually died out as I stopped caring about them. Around the same time, LiveJournal became more of a place for long form posts, and eventually a place where the vast majority of my posts were a form of explicitly outsourced memory, as evidenced by one of my favorite posts.
2,663 entries later (about one every 2.75 days), I am essentially the last person from my original peer group or any of the other LiveJournal peer groups I picked up who is still posting to LiveJournal. Ten years ago when I discussed how long I'd been doing specific activities, I didn't even mention LiveJournal. With all the recent changes in my life, LiveJournal is more or less second to being an Oakland A's fan in my list of activities - it's about even with my now defunct radio show, and 10 months away from passing my longest professional employment.
The conversion to longer form posts unquestionably made me a better writer in all contexts, particularly work contexts, in a way that no other activity of my life did, not even all those English classes in college. Someone once famously said that the unexamined life is not worth living. In addition to helping fix my memory, LiveJournal has also become a very low key form of therapy, in that it forces me to think about things I've done, occasionally big but mostly small.
When my sister and I were doing ballroom dance together in college, swing dancing was having a bit of moment. There was a much older couple who consistently attended the swing dancing portion of the class who said "we were swing dancing when it was cool the first time, and then when it wasn't cool, and now here we are and it's cool again." I feel that way about LiveJournal sometimes. I don't know if it will be cool again one day, but I rather doubt it as technology and society move farther away from writing and more toward videos and pictures. However, if that day comes when LiveJournal rises again, I suspect you'll find me here still posting regularly as I have for the last twenty years and hope to do for many more. Who knows, maybe my many jokes about "history grad students of the future" reading this archive the way that they read collections of letters from years past will one day come true. If so, my apologies to any future grad students who read this for not talking more about current events.
My first few years of LiveJournal posts are mostly not particularly interesting to read after the fact. There was a lot of "how I am feeling" and "what I'm doing tomorrow" or "you should join me for this event," which never really worked, I might add. LiveJournal had a famous reputation for being drama city, and there was a little bit of that on my personal journal, although not much. There was a lot of weird experimentation as people figured out how social media worked, or how they wanted it to work. It's somewhat hard to believe as we look back twenty years, but in 2003 the open internet full of individual weirdness was still the many form, rather than the walled gardens that predominate today. The public internet in the form of web browsers was maybe ten years old, judging by 1em's recent "30th anniversary of writing HTML post, and like most ten-year-olds, there was a lot of immaturity and strangeness with occasional moments of deep clarity.
A little more than five years later, I joined Facebook. Most of the weird one-liners and moments in time moved there, and then eventually died out as I stopped caring about them. Around the same time, LiveJournal became more of a place for long form posts, and eventually a place where the vast majority of my posts were a form of explicitly outsourced memory, as evidenced by one of my favorite posts.
2,663 entries later (about one every 2.75 days), I am essentially the last person from my original peer group or any of the other LiveJournal peer groups I picked up who is still posting to LiveJournal. Ten years ago when I discussed how long I'd been doing specific activities, I didn't even mention LiveJournal. With all the recent changes in my life, LiveJournal is more or less second to being an Oakland A's fan in my list of activities - it's about even with my now defunct radio show, and 10 months away from passing my longest professional employment.
The conversion to longer form posts unquestionably made me a better writer in all contexts, particularly work contexts, in a way that no other activity of my life did, not even all those English classes in college. Someone once famously said that the unexamined life is not worth living. In addition to helping fix my memory, LiveJournal has also become a very low key form of therapy, in that it forces me to think about things I've done, occasionally big but mostly small.
When my sister and I were doing ballroom dance together in college, swing dancing was having a bit of moment. There was a much older couple who consistently attended the swing dancing portion of the class who said "we were swing dancing when it was cool the first time, and then when it wasn't cool, and now here we are and it's cool again." I feel that way about LiveJournal sometimes. I don't know if it will be cool again one day, but I rather doubt it as technology and society move farther away from writing and more toward videos and pictures. However, if that day comes when LiveJournal rises again, I suspect you'll find me here still posting regularly as I have for the last twenty years and hope to do for many more. Who knows, maybe my many jokes about "history grad students of the future" reading this archive the way that they read collections of letters from years past will one day come true. If so, my apologies to any future grad students who read this for not talking more about current events.