the banality of livejournals
Jul. 25th, 2005 12:05![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
piranhathe 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.
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.