Essay rec: LJ as a medium
Essay rec: double_helix has a fascinating post here on the effect of LJ on fannish communication. Well worth checking out; she considers the effect of the switch from Usenet and mailing lists (technologies which basically filtered content by subject and encouraged threaded discussion) to LJ (a technology which basically filters by person and in which
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Oh, my yes. There's an advantage to having a soapbox of one's own. On the other hand the funny thing about the technology is that our readers don't experience our soapbox as ours but as theirs -- our posts are chopped off from the rest of our LJs and concatenated in someone's friends list. So the post is on our time, yes, but also weirdly on theirs, or on the scrap or fragment of theirs that the technology allows.
Totally OT, and perhaps I'm contradicting myself here, but you know what LJ reminds me of? Have you ever seen Wings of Desire (the original German version, there's a remake I haven't seen.) -- It's a movie about angels watching over Berlin. The angels kind of drift over the city (in trench coats; I'm not sure why) and listen to bits and scraps of people's disconnected thoughts. In a way this contact is peculiarly intimate (the angels are hearing thoughts after all) but in a way it's strangely impersonal -- the thoughts all kind of merge ( ... )
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Oh yes! It does resemble that, now you mention it. Especially when you read someone else's friends list. Personal random stuff from total strangers, each in their own voice.
(Btw, I liked that film until the climax, where it suddenly warped into a 15-minute monologue of European Artistic Deepness. Blech. Way to kill a great setup.)
isn't it also necessarily true of other forms of autobiography?
Hmm, yes - probably the reason why autobiographies are best published posthumously. ;)
whether or to what extent LJ is a form of autobiography or a form of public communication.
That seems to be a constant debate, and probably will have produced a thousand Master's theses in Communication and/or Psychology by the end of the decade. My own answer remains that it's definitely communication, since if it were really truly "just for me," I'd mark every entry "private." Knowing people are reading it changes the tone. Then people try to tell me it shouldn't change the ( ... )
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The funny thing for me, too, is that I always find I get a better sense of people relating to them through the subject matter than in listening to them talk about their life. Listening to people talk about the hobbits gives me a sense of who they are and then after that if they mention what they do for a living it adds to that for me. I find doing it the other way around more distancing, in a way. It's very strange.
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Hmm, well, isn't it interesting how we come to a sense of people's characters? In a book that I unfortunately cannot otherwise remember to save my soul, a perceptive teenage character says he always judges people by the way they make left turns. Makes sense to me. I guess in fandom, yes, oddly there does seem to be some kind of a relationship in my head -- though perhaps it's only there -- between the way people relate to LotR's characters and the way they otherwise turn out to be. (I also find myself imagining -- is it only imagination, I wonder? that the way a person writes Frodo in particular in LotR (and Draco in particular in HP) sometimes seems almost more like TMI than a blow-by-blow description of that persons recent minor surgery ( ... )
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You too? Wow, what are the odds?!
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I thought I was the only one! *feels sense of shame diminish * tries to get another peek of Frodo with his shirt off...*
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I don't suppose you can tell me where these oversexed hobbits might be found? Just so I can, you know, avoid them more efficiently.
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the nature of f-lists makes it unlikely that {generic cool person} will read anything I say, particularly in this fandom where the ability to write amazing stories is the currency of popularity.Well, erm, you CAN write amazing stories, and some of us are still waiting to hear more about the adventures of geologist Frodo. I do grant your larger point, however: LJ is very hard to get started in, much more so than a message board or a list. There's always this sense that you're on someone else's personal turf, and that you're talking to their best buddies, and that the ongoing discussion is one of those hermetically sealed conversations among like-minded friends of long standing. For me this feeling hasn't gone away even though I've been here for almost a year now. I have people on my flist that I haven't DARED speak to, even in cases where we are mutually friended ( ... )
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Well, yes, there's the sense that commenting in someone's LJ is sort of treading in their personal space. (BTW, odds are high that people who have friended you but not commented are not thinking "Ick!" but "OMG I don't dare post a comment in the Brilliant Teasel's journal so I'll just lurk". :D ( ... )
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