The real world?
Feb. 20th, 2008 03:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avevale_intelligencer I can't link to her eloquent and closely-reasoned post on the subject because it's friends-locked, for obvious reasons, and for reasons that would become equally obvious if you could read the post, she's disabled comments. So I'm going to talk about it here, and see what emerges, with the underlying thought that while I agree whole-heartedly with all her reasons, I don't think they apply to me.
I'm not a real person, you see. Never have been. Oh, I have a birth certificate and a passport, there's a physical body sitting here that used to resemble the avvie in the icon, and I have memories of a life spent mostly in the real world among people who might be able to vouch for my identity, if they cared. But for as long as I can remember, I've been living mostly inside my head, telling myself stories, singing myself songs, spinning off characters and scenes, because I have always known the difference between the real world and fantasy and I know which I prefer. I'm not a real person in the way that someone might say they're not a dog person. There are good things in the real world, of course, lots of them, but on the whole the real world doesn't seem to feel that it needs or wants me around, and when I try to interact with it beyond the minimum necessary for survival it makes that feeling perfectly clear to me.
But one thing about the real world that I love is having real friends to talk to and exchange ideas and songs and stories with. It's best of all when I'm able to see them face to face and exchange real hugs as well instead of virtual ones, but for one reason and another that has been becoming less and less feasible, which is the kind of thing the real world tends to do that puts me off it. You can see where I'm going here: the internet, and LJ in my particular case, is my lifeline to where my friends are. When I get bored with the scene inside my head, I can reach out through the wires and find kindred souls all over the world.
My friend says that LJ's "comment" feature encourages people to turn off their brains and react instantly and without thinking to what they read. I've never been able to do that. My brain may be old, clunky, made out of bits of two brains knocked together, missing several parts, held together by baling wire and lacking any kind of operator's manual, but one thing about it, it never stops trying to work. (Sometimes I wish to gods it would, just for a little while.) If you see something written here, as a post or a comment, you can be sure that I've thought about it. Maybe completely wrongly, and I'm as prone as anyone else to jumping to a false conclusion, but I can't write without thinking about what I'm writing, editing and re-editing on the fly, and probably going back in and editing again once I've posted. The brain is running all the time. There've been complaints about the grinding noises.
To me the opportunity to comment and be commented on is one of the main points of being on a blog at all, and LJ has become one of my main homes on the net, along with various other forums. I don't think this is a waste of my time at all; it's not as if I'm doing anything else useful with it at the moment, and every so often in the course of my maunderings I come up with a good bit and surprise myself. I'm a writer, and this is writing. It takes a very great deal of upset to make me turn off my feedback.
I fully understand why my friend is reclaiming her real life, and I applaud her. But I think I'll be staying here.
I'm not a real person, you see. Never have been. Oh, I have a birth certificate and a passport, there's a physical body sitting here that used to resemble the avvie in the icon, and I have memories of a life spent mostly in the real world among people who might be able to vouch for my identity, if they cared. But for as long as I can remember, I've been living mostly inside my head, telling myself stories, singing myself songs, spinning off characters and scenes, because I have always known the difference between the real world and fantasy and I know which I prefer. I'm not a real person in the way that someone might say they're not a dog person. There are good things in the real world, of course, lots of them, but on the whole the real world doesn't seem to feel that it needs or wants me around, and when I try to interact with it beyond the minimum necessary for survival it makes that feeling perfectly clear to me.
But one thing about the real world that I love is having real friends to talk to and exchange ideas and songs and stories with. It's best of all when I'm able to see them face to face and exchange real hugs as well instead of virtual ones, but for one reason and another that has been becoming less and less feasible, which is the kind of thing the real world tends to do that puts me off it. You can see where I'm going here: the internet, and LJ in my particular case, is my lifeline to where my friends are. When I get bored with the scene inside my head, I can reach out through the wires and find kindred souls all over the world.
My friend says that LJ's "comment" feature encourages people to turn off their brains and react instantly and without thinking to what they read. I've never been able to do that. My brain may be old, clunky, made out of bits of two brains knocked together, missing several parts, held together by baling wire and lacking any kind of operator's manual, but one thing about it, it never stops trying to work. (Sometimes I wish to gods it would, just for a little while.) If you see something written here, as a post or a comment, you can be sure that I've thought about it. Maybe completely wrongly, and I'm as prone as anyone else to jumping to a false conclusion, but I can't write without thinking about what I'm writing, editing and re-editing on the fly, and probably going back in and editing again once I've posted. The brain is running all the time. There've been complaints about the grinding noises.
To me the opportunity to comment and be commented on is one of the main points of being on a blog at all, and LJ has become one of my main homes on the net, along with various other forums. I don't think this is a waste of my time at all; it's not as if I'm doing anything else useful with it at the moment, and every so often in the course of my maunderings I come up with a good bit and surprise myself. I'm a writer, and this is writing. It takes a very great deal of upset to make me turn off my feedback.
I fully understand why my friend is reclaiming her real life, and I applaud her. But I think I'll be staying here.
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no subject
Date: 2008-02-20 06:10 pm (UTC)And that's another reason I get frustrated with LJ. It's very difficult to get a real thread going which runs over several days, because it isn't (as far as I can tell) possible for anyone apart from the owner of a post to get updated when other people add comments (apart from the limited case when the comment is directly to the commenter). This means that when the original post scrolls off the end of everyone's flist the thread is effectively dead, and for most people I know this happens within a day or so.
I joined LJ in order to see friends' posts, and to comment. Without comments LJ is just a journal of not much interest to anyone apart from the author, or at least it is as far as authors are concerned because they wouldn't get any feedback.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-20 06:28 pm (UTC)The pushpin icon also appears on every comment to an entry, so if you just want to track a particular thread, you can do that as well. I'm afraid it does mean you have to use a graphic browser, though - I'm not sure if the 'track this' link appears in a text-only one!
no subject
Date: 2008-02-20 08:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-20 08:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-21 08:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-20 06:33 pm (UTC)I don't have anything to add, but to point out to Keris the 'track this' feature which means you can follow all the comments to a post of a particular thread, as if they were replies to you.
And I agree that comments are important and a large part of why livejournal is a good tool.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-21 02:47 am (UTC)I've found often in the past that posts with major thought and big questions in get few responses, while discussions of comparative sweets, popcorn, whether my cat can see angels, and what to do with 20 diet coke cans garner literally hundreds. I think LJ readers mostly like "lite" *ugh* content. ;-)
no subject
Date: 2008-02-21 08:51 am (UTC)