A REAL LIVEJOURNAL ENTRY!

[humberthumbert]

On the Internet, all you really have to identify yourself to strangers is your list of "interests" and likes/dislikes. I mean, unless they read your book reviews. And over the past couple of years, as I slid down the cool scale, I've been gradually deeming all my guilty pleasures merely pleasures (and I've stopped sounding off so loudly about

Comments

[queenkatieett]

To answer your questions: yes, there is no opposite, and no.

What do you mean by "How did people get to know one another a hundred years ago?"? It's like you're suggesting that people only became interested in things starting in 1955. Even without band t-shirts, the clothes told you how much money a person had, and that's all that mattered. Oh, simple times.

[humberthumbert]

I plan to have my first draft finished before I'm 26. I predict that this is a goal I will actually meet, but meeting this meager goal makes me neither prolific nor controversial nor certifiably brilliant, so I won't be able to test my third hypothesis yet.

"A hundred years ago," though, any quick judgments of a person would be economic and class-based, whether they were judgments of clothing or hygiene or demeanor or, I don't know, horseless carriage. The whole pattern of getting-to-know-people-by-interests, which is what every person does today, is kind of the new lowest-common-denominator of quick judgment calls. Now it's a lot harder to judge someone's economic class at a glance, but taste is easier to spot.
"Interests" are the first topics of conversation at places that draw all kinds of people equally: bars, schools, that sort of thing. And "interests" don't usually come into play at places where there is some other lowest-common-denominator of community: AA groups, churches, etc.
Do you know what I mean?