the banality of livejournals

[piranha]

the last few days i've been missing usenet a lot, which reminded me to pull this comment from a thread else-lj. somebody said: blogs and journals appear to be where intelligent and witty people went to be boring and banal.

and i replied:

oh yeah, this is where i went to be banal. pretty much explicitly. because that's how much of my life is, banal. that's also where i derive some of my greatest pleasures, in the small daily things around me. and i write a journal in order to communicate those little things to those who know me and care to hear from me. there aren't enough hours in the day to write email to everyone i like, thoughtful email takes a lot of energy, and less thoughtful but still connective email can't bear being written several times to several people. ergo, my LJ.

it could use more thoughtful posts, mind. it's not that i no longer think intelligently, or that i put more effort into my usenet posts, but i put rather less of the deep stuff in my LJ than i ever put on usenet. i am not entirely certain why that is. maybe because it's either a very solitary task (while i am learning about a subject), or one that gains immeasurably from exposure to other intelligent people, and the latter is very clearly a task for usenet, IMO. not that there aren't intelligent people on LJ, but random folks don't drive by like they do on usenet, and then there's the weird ethos of respecting the space of a person's LJ which seems to me to extend to being much more wishy-washy and polite, and carrying real critical analysis on in one's own LJ, and *bang!* fractured conversation, impossible to track.

i'm still experimenting with the format, and it's not even really close to what i want it to be for myself.

Comments

[brooksmoses]

...random folks don't drive by like they do on usenet...

There's also the point that it's difficult to have a real conversation in drive-bys. It's difficult to have a conversation in LJ that involves more than two people and goes on for more than a day or so, and certainly after a day or so it's unlikely that more people will come across it even if there is an ongoing conversation. That's at least part of why I would tend to put "real critical analysis" (were I to post any of it) in my own journal -- otherwise, I'll lose track of it.

TNH seems to have solved the conversation problem by getting a blog early enough and making it interesting enough that she has a thriving community that lives solely in her comment spaces. That particular success is hard to duplicate, though.

On the idea of LJ being a place to be boring and banal, incidentally -- one of the reasons that lilairen and I got livejournals in the first place was to be able to share the boring parts of life with each other -- the bits that produce a feeling of shared space, but don't really withstand being forced into the mold of interestingness that email sort of requires.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

yeah, there are bloggers who have a dedicated following large enough to provide somewhat the feel of a good newsgroup, though the software still sucks. i never visualised being that kind of blogger though, because it requires too much steady intellectual work, and i don't have as much of that capability in my noggin as TNH and others.

i'd like to -- very gently -- protest the designation of those bits that produce a feeling of shared space as "boring". i admit to banal, but not to boring. i am not bored by the banal parts of my life, or of the lives of people i like. maybe i should use the term "trivial" instead of "banal"; i just really like the sound of the latter, *grin*.

i've learned to expect less of myself as regards interestingness of email as well, but been a very slow learner, and there is still a part of me that just hasn't internalised it enough. and if i don't have it down after 4 years of daily email exchange with the *poing*, i am not sure i'll ever really get it.

[serenejournal.livejournal.com]

I'm enchanted by the image on your background.

And yes. Yes. There is something about LJ that attracts me -- never feeling bad about talking about my mundanity is one. There is something about email that is better, but I have the issues you mentioned above. And there is something about Usenet that would be ideal if it still had a lot of the people I enjoyed it for there. I don't think I've found the ideal thing for myself. I think that the social groups on Usenet are the closest I've come to what I want (for one thing, me me me stuff is welcome on alt.poly, soc.bi, ssm, and ssg), but it's clearing out as people move to LJ.

[serenejournal.livejournal.com]

What *is* the image? someotherguy says it looks kinda like solar flares.

my background image

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

it's completely artificial; i made it from scratch in photoshop. :) thanks for the compliment!

[lcohen]

you were the person who got me to start an LJ, dear one. just so that we all know who my pimp daddy of LJ crack was ;-) .

[serenejournal.livejournal.com]

Yeah, yeah, they always blame the supplier and let the addict off scot-free. -- Hey, Is "scot-free" a racial slur? If so, scratch the "scot" part.

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

blogs and journals appear to be where intelligent and witty people went to be boring and banal.

It's always a crushing blow to egotists when they realize that the entire world isn't there to entertain them.

[pameladean]

I love the daily-life posts, the very very small things. If you don't have that, you don't have much, in my opinion. Frankly, I think that's about all government is good for, creating a space where people have time to post in great detail about how the dishwasher overflowed and the cat got stuck on the shed roof and the banana flower is hard to find and harder to slice. Because if people have the space and time to do that, they have the space and time for thought and creation. I don't believe in the crucible theory of greatness, not as a rule. I know it works that way for some people, but it's not the way to bet. People can make their own crucibles, anyway, if they find it necessary.

Wow, there's rambling banality for you. Look, the imitative fallacy!

P.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

Yes, the thing I really miss on lj is the ability to keep a discussion, involving more than two people, going for more than about 48 hours.

I also have fairly significant "popularity contest" issues, in terms of who's on whose friendlist and why. Unless no-one ever replied to anything I posted on alt.poly, it wouldn't bother me that I got a fraction of the follow-ups of other posters. I do understand rationally that you can't force people to pay attention to you, and they're not more likely to enjoy your company if you do, but the unevenness is I think better hidden on newsgroups.

response rates

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

interesting. i don't know that i even register that sort of thing, probably partly because once i've read an entry and the comments it has at that time, i don't return to it unless i've made a serious reply myself, and/or try to purposely follow the discussion for several days. i sometimes see in retrospect that a thread has really ballooned when somebody links back into it to point out aspects of the discussion. but for the most part i have no good feel for it.

you think response rates are better hidden in newsgroups? hm. if i read a newsgroup every day, my pattern matcher will build up a fairly decent gestalt of who gets a lot of replies and who doesn't. and once upon a time i used to follow in statman's footsteps and run statistics for a few newsgroups, which allowed me to double-check the pattern matcher.

here i have mostly no idea who gets a lot of responses, except for people who obviously get a lot because they've reached a certain degree of "fame". i'm utterly clueless regarding most people here, frex as to whether your journal gets more or less or about the same amount of response, for example.

i suspect i would find LJ a lonely place if i hadn't known people here already when i joined. i am much worse at building new friendships here than on usenet.

Re: response rates

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

Obviously something a bit different is going on in my brain. Thinking about it, I think it has something to do with territory.

Assume I'm someone who doesn't get many comments. If I make a comment on a thread on a newsgroup, if even one person follows-up, and they're someone who gets a lot of comments, I feel like I'm part of a bigger thing. Whereas someone who gets a lot of comments on lj won't get them if they've made a comment on a posting by me, only if they make a posting of their own. So the lots of comments become more tightly tied to that particular person, rather than being part of a thread.

Basically, I think I have a problem with the fact that posts are privileged above comments in lj, unlike newsgroups, where it's all the same stuff. My fantasy lj would include not only my friendslist (new threads) but also let me mark posts or comments, as in "let me know if further comments are posted in response"; regardless of whether I'd commented on that thread myself.

And what is so wrong about this?

[(Anonymous)]

How about this: work is the mundane. I enjoy my work most of the time. I am well thought of, even respected by most of my peers/colleagues, etc. It is a large part of my self-definition. I value it, most of time; I sure don't do it for the money, so it must have some other intrinsic value.
But: it is tiring. It can be very difficult work of the mind, mixed with considering what the impact of what I do will be on the issue I am trying to address, including the impact on the people involved. There is a lot of intellectual discussion and argument in that world, working on projects that require a goodly amount of intellectual precision. When I am really done for the day or week, maybe I need to do something banal. My amusement about how the old mean cat interacts with the dogs, or just HAS to go out and play "jungle kitty" on a nice day, or whatever, is part of what allows me to relax and get away from the serious world. Most people, I bet, would be more interested in reading about that part of my life than of what I do at work, which can be pretty harsh. Reading something so inane as the Harry Potter series, and making the effort to reserve the new book at the library as soon as it is announced, even though I am roughly 4.5X the target audience, has a value of its own. Such values need not be tangible.
I've read with some interest the recent posts about scents, getting ethyl alcohol, and the like. Is some part of it foreign to me, and not really relevant? Yes. I am not good at distinguishing scents and flavors of foods, for whatever reason. However, the description of the exploration and process in which you are engaged is of interest, again, for intangible reasons. Some of the fascination of life is seeing the way the dishwater gets dirty looking; not everything is space exploration.
Maybe as we get older, or have other parts of our lives which need more attention, the energy invested in earnest thought/conversation/argument loses value, at least when compared to the value we receive from doing so.

Re: And what is so wrong about this?

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

Some of the fascination of life is seeing the way the dishwater gets dirty looking

most definitely. i've always felt that way, but i didn't quite pay attention to such small things to the degree that i do now. i credit the depression with that (gotta milk it for what few good things it does for me :); it has slowed me way, way down.

Maybe as we get older, or have other parts of our lives which need more attention, the energy invested in earnest thought/conversation/argument loses value, at least when compared to the value we receive from doing so.

hm. this is only partly true for me. it definitely works this way when it comes to ye same olde arguments that i've heard since college. i am no longer interested at all in discussing certain subjects with people, and the number of those subjects keeps increasing. but in general it's not true -- i am willing to invest considerable thought in subjects for which i've not yet run out of patience, and -- if anything -- have become more willing to do so for subjects that i feel uncomfortable about, and about which i have prejudices. with the right kind of people, that is. i still pull all-nighters when a friend and i really hit on one those moods, usually after not seeing each other for a long time. :)

thanks for your comment.

[lcohen]

i don't think of LJ as banal, so much as truncated. which i would flesh out more, but i have a banal meeting to get to *g*.