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 07:05 pm (UTC)1. Instant commenting, to my mind, resembles the instant feedback one gets in a real world face to face conversation. These may not be well thought out, but between the people conversing, the interchange of ideas is possible. This is what conversation is like, and it's one of the reasons that I like LJ. I've tried keeping a traditional-style journal, and it is too solitary to be of much use/pleasure.
2. With the way life is now, I'd say that for many people, something like LJ is part of RL. I've always had a very active inner life too, but with living abroad for many years, in a foreign language environment, I have come to find that however rich the inner life, it doesn't supply all my needs. The interactions of LJ, while they may not involve eye contact, as it were, give me the social milieu I've been missing. I've learned German, I've learned French - but one needs mother tongue interaction, shared perceptions, culture, jokes, quips, silliness... All of it. Life takes people away from one another - one grows up, one goes away, one's friends move away, one loses touch. Here, I'm most emphatically IN touch with new friends I have found. This may be a virtual space, but it's a very real one.