| Jan. 7th, 2005 @ 11:49 pm LiveJournal and the detriment to long distance friendships. |
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I wrote this after getting up at 3am to be on my way to Melbourne for New Years. My lift was suppsoed to pick me up at 4 but was an hour late. It was something I'd been thinking about, and I'm a weirdo who writes essays for fun. I hope it doesnt upset anyone because its actually meant to do the opposite. So here goes.
If this strikes a chord with you, either as someone with my point, or someone who feels they have been misunderstood because of their LJ, I'd be interested to know. it's become quite the study for me. And if you feel like reposting this in your own journal, go for it.
I think most of us have friends that keep LJ’s. It’s the thing to do, its somewhere to vent, to think out loud, to put yourself out there. LJ’s are actually quite theraputic, you can say what you want and what you need to say, and know that somewhere, sometime, your friends are going to read it and know how you are feeling. But I, like many others, have friends that I don’t keep in close contact with. The occasional MSN, text message, maybe catch up once a year when I am in their city or they are in mine. As such, the LJ becomes my primary mode of knowing what goes on in their lives. This can be useful. Rather than the ‘how are you going? “good”, “Hows work?” “good” stuff, I get to not only keep tabs on events in their lives but the way they feel about it. It’s a little window to the souls of people I’m not spacially or even emotionally close enough with to otherwise be aware of their issues. But is this a good thing? Can always being aware of your friends and acquaintances innermost issues but not having the ‘how are you going? “good”, “Hows work?” “good” to equalize it be detrimental to those friendships instead of making people closer? I say yes.
I like my friends. The people on my ‘friends’ page on LJ are there for a reason. They are there because I care about them, I care about what they have to say, how they feel, what they are up to. If I didn’t care, they wouldn’t pop up on my radar every few days with their latest entry. However, as my primary form of contact, I find more and more often that the people I know they are, happy people with normal lives and friends slip further away and the picture that’s left, through sheer force of replacement is that my friends are whingers. They aren’t. For me to say they were would make me the nastiest form of bitch and liar. But when my primary contact is through a medium that’s designed for spilling your guts and little else, then it’s an image that builds. When you have a bad day, you post in your LJ. When you are depressed or sad, or lonely… you post in your LJ. Had a fight with your family or friends? Vent in your LJ. It’s a simple fact that happy joyous posts are few and far between, simply because when you are happy and joyous you generally have better things to do than post in your electronic public diary. So through no fault of their own, and in a very wrong and skewed way I am left with a subconscious image of the people that I love as eye rollingly melodramatic and depressed.
Let me state once again for the record, that this is not how I actually see them. It’s just how a little part of me, the one that doesn’t think with logic and the benefit of the rest of my brain, feels when I see the latest rant. Read the latest heart rending appeal over the suckiness of life. Its quickly squashed, but the less other contact and the more reading of LJ, the stronger that feeling can get. Consciously I know its wrong. Emotionally, it puts me in an interesting position.
I am not alone in this. It’s an idea that came to me not so long ago, while reading a ‘friends’ page that was not my own. A friend of a friend was having a really bad time. Not a tragically bad time where your heart goes out to them, just one of those ‘it all sucks, life sucks, my friends suck, my job sucks’ crap run of the mill times. And all unthinking I commented to my friend ‘Jesus, what a whinger…’ He immediately jumped to her defence, she wasn’t a whinger, she was a lovely person. Friendly, happy, and a joy to know. Her LJ was her release, her diary and her place to vent. She didn’t post for sympathy, she posted to get things straight in her head. This led me to look again at some of the unthinking opinions I’d attached to the people on my own friends list. I sat down and went through the last 100 entries. And for over 75% of them, my initial reaction had been ‘sigh, so and so is at it again’. On further thinking (yeah, yeah, I was having a quiet week, ok?) I realized that in a lot of those cases where the people who’s posts I see but whose faces and voices I don’t, my perceptions had subtly changed. Nothing conscious, I still liked and appreciated every single one of them, but when their name popped up I reacted with a sigh rather than a smile. I’d started skipping entries because I couldn’t be bothered with the latest issue.
So I started asking around. Once I put this theory, in a really condensed form, to the people I know who also read LJ’s on a regular basis, I got a lot of looks of dawning comprehension. Noone had noticed, but one they took a look at their feelings, most had realized that there were at least one or two people on their list that they see as a total sadsack. Someone who made them roll their eyes. While I chatted to these people I asked them to think about the last non-LJ contact they had with each of these people. Almost invariably, someone had someone who was only showing one facet of a wonderful personality in his or her journal and saving the rest of it for the real world. And being misunderstood as a result.
So are LJ’s a wonderful release? A private yet public piece of space for venting and ranting and expressing? Definitely. But as the reader of LJ’s we have to be careful to keep them and their tales in the allocated place. To remember the good when reading about the bad. This is no fault, in any way, of the poster themselves. One should never have to self moderate a journal, public or not, in order to preserve their audiences image of them. Kinda defeats the purpose, no? But I, for one, am going to read my Friends page in a different light. For every depressed entry, I’m going to remember a fun time. I’m going to contact my friends more often and hear their happy stories. I’m not going to roll my eyes when I hear their latest woe. Coz that’s what the journal is all about, what its there for, and I hope when people read mine, they remember it’s only a small part of me too. |
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