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slipjig3I got a notification yesterday, congratulating me on the 20th anniversary of my LiveJournal.
20th anniversary. Of my LiveJournal.
How in the holy crumbcake do I even begin processing that?
I mean, how many things have I ever done for 20 years? Granted, I'm on Dreamwidth now, but it's part of the continuum—scroll far enough back, and the imported posts will take you all the damn way to July 3, 2002, when my life was different enough to be unrecognizable now. That was back when you either needed a startup code from someone who already had an LJ or had to cough up for a paid account. I forked over the five bucks even though I knew no one on here, but wanted in because having your own Internet space still meant finding someone with space to spare. I remember who my first LJ friends were: my college friend Bryan, andkimberly_a, and a few folks from Larissa's Binghamton crowd. I remember the process of finding folks through shared interests and interesting comments on other peoples' blogs, and how quickly I became invested in their stories and their social circles became mine.
Every year or two, I write something up on one of my social mediases about how important LJ was to me and those close at hand (extremely); how different LJ culture is to any current stomping grounds (radically); how much I miss the presumptive Golden Age (desperately); how my wife, all of my past roommates, most of my relationships and how I conduct them, the area I call my home, my music, my writing, all have roots to one degree or another in this aging little corner of online life. And every bit of that is true, but somehow it's only now that I've started asking the question, "Was it LiveJournal, or was it us?"
My department at work recently hired on a couple of folks on the low end of twenty-something, born early enough that they wouldn't have even brushed sleeves with LJ on the way to their Tweetbooks and Snapagrams. Since I'd just started posting again, I tried to explain just what the big deal was, why it proved so transformative. It wasn't even like it was the only game in town back then—there were other blogging sites, and Myspace had been Scotchgarding everyone's retinas for a while. it took some doing to get to the heart of it: LJ made you work for it, while also making it worth it. Every social media platform has been about streamlining the social experience, because why write a paragraph when you can compress your engagement to a preselected icon? Steve Martin used to hand out cards to fans he ran into that read, "This certifies that you had a personal encounter with me and that you found me warm, polite, intelligent, and funny." It's what Zuckerberg et al have done, only cutting out the middleman.
The only times LJ streamlined anything was to change the interface to make it easier to read. They might streamline the experience, but not the engagement. We wrote long, thoughtful posts because we got long, thoughtful responses, which we'd then give to their long, thoughtful posts as well. If you want to express that you care, you had to say so, not paste a fucking "CARE" sticker to feign involvement. Do people who weren't the right age to participate know the depth of intimacy that creates? I spilled so many intimate details, joyous and painful and embarrassing and silly and trivial and monumental, in a way that startles me to think about now. Crises were followed and followed up on. Flirting flew across pages like moths. Sex was as easy to share as today's breakfast. Facebook users are brought together, it has nothing to do with Facebook; when the people of LiveJournal were brought together, it was absolutely because of LiveJournal. For all of the memetic currency that we eat and breathe today, could you even imagine something like Blogathon of Blog Like It's the End of the World happening now? And for everything given, more often than not it all got given back. Four paragraphs of shared grief and loneliness would receive a simple response of "I read the whole thing," and it meant more than a thousand like buttons, because it didn't come by accident. It couldn't.
Maybe it had more to do with who we all were back then than I'm admitting to myself, but I can't help but thing that it was the forum, that place-not-a-place, that made it possible for us to be those people at that time. Whenever I've returned to LJ/DW since the tide started turning, it's never stuck because I'm saddened by the lack of interaction, that it's not what it was. This time, I've come back because even in this one post, I've written more than I have in the last two months on Facebook, which I'm arguably more "active" in. It's not because it's safe, whatever that means, but because it's hard. Community is hard. Friendship is hard. Love is hard. Life is fucking hard. And after twenty years of doing this, I find myself needing a lot less of the easy.
For those of you who were there, who held some part of my life during that time no matter how small, I thank you. Still here, still writing. And I know this might not be your place any more, and that's fine. I've got my old pictures and stories and the music we shared, and a stupid icon of a medieval pig because in 2002 I didn't know what else to use. Feel free to stop by, any time.
20th anniversary. Of my LiveJournal.
How in the holy crumbcake do I even begin processing that?
I mean, how many things have I ever done for 20 years? Granted, I'm on Dreamwidth now, but it's part of the continuum—scroll far enough back, and the imported posts will take you all the damn way to July 3, 2002, when my life was different enough to be unrecognizable now. That was back when you either needed a startup code from someone who already had an LJ or had to cough up for a paid account. I forked over the five bucks even though I knew no one on here, but wanted in because having your own Internet space still meant finding someone with space to spare. I remember who my first LJ friends were: my college friend Bryan, and
kimberly_a, and a few folks from Larissa's Binghamton crowd. I remember the process of finding folks through shared interests and interesting comments on other peoples' blogs, and how quickly I became invested in their stories and their social circles became mine.Every year or two, I write something up on one of my social mediases about how important LJ was to me and those close at hand (extremely); how different LJ culture is to any current stomping grounds (radically); how much I miss the presumptive Golden Age (desperately); how my wife, all of my past roommates, most of my relationships and how I conduct them, the area I call my home, my music, my writing, all have roots to one degree or another in this aging little corner of online life. And every bit of that is true, but somehow it's only now that I've started asking the question, "Was it LiveJournal, or was it us?"
My department at work recently hired on a couple of folks on the low end of twenty-something, born early enough that they wouldn't have even brushed sleeves with LJ on the way to their Tweetbooks and Snapagrams. Since I'd just started posting again, I tried to explain just what the big deal was, why it proved so transformative. It wasn't even like it was the only game in town back then—there were other blogging sites, and Myspace had been Scotchgarding everyone's retinas for a while. it took some doing to get to the heart of it: LJ made you work for it, while also making it worth it. Every social media platform has been about streamlining the social experience, because why write a paragraph when you can compress your engagement to a preselected icon? Steve Martin used to hand out cards to fans he ran into that read, "This certifies that you had a personal encounter with me and that you found me warm, polite, intelligent, and funny." It's what Zuckerberg et al have done, only cutting out the middleman.
The only times LJ streamlined anything was to change the interface to make it easier to read. They might streamline the experience, but not the engagement. We wrote long, thoughtful posts because we got long, thoughtful responses, which we'd then give to their long, thoughtful posts as well. If you want to express that you care, you had to say so, not paste a fucking "CARE" sticker to feign involvement. Do people who weren't the right age to participate know the depth of intimacy that creates? I spilled so many intimate details, joyous and painful and embarrassing and silly and trivial and monumental, in a way that startles me to think about now. Crises were followed and followed up on. Flirting flew across pages like moths. Sex was as easy to share as today's breakfast. Facebook users are brought together, it has nothing to do with Facebook; when the people of LiveJournal were brought together, it was absolutely because of LiveJournal. For all of the memetic currency that we eat and breathe today, could you even imagine something like Blogathon of Blog Like It's the End of the World happening now? And for everything given, more often than not it all got given back. Four paragraphs of shared grief and loneliness would receive a simple response of "I read the whole thing," and it meant more than a thousand like buttons, because it didn't come by accident. It couldn't.
Maybe it had more to do with who we all were back then than I'm admitting to myself, but I can't help but thing that it was the forum, that place-not-a-place, that made it possible for us to be those people at that time. Whenever I've returned to LJ/DW since the tide started turning, it's never stuck because I'm saddened by the lack of interaction, that it's not what it was. This time, I've come back because even in this one post, I've written more than I have in the last two months on Facebook, which I'm arguably more "active" in. It's not because it's safe, whatever that means, but because it's hard. Community is hard. Friendship is hard. Love is hard. Life is fucking hard. And after twenty years of doing this, I find myself needing a lot less of the easy.
For those of you who were there, who held some part of my life during that time no matter how small, I thank you. Still here, still writing. And I know this might not be your place any more, and that's fine. I've got my old pictures and stories and the music we shared, and a stupid icon of a medieval pig because in 2002 I didn't know what else to use. Feel free to stop by, any time.
