did you ever use LiveJournal? I miss it a lot.
The reason I miss it mostly is because LiveJournal existed prior to social media, and was a great way to have a social media style friends list and feed, but it was long form too.
LiveJournal though was only long-form if you wanted it to be that. Otherwise it could be like Twitter/X – a short one line post was totally acceptable. Composing for LiveJournal really, in hindsight, feels like freedom. We currently live in a very rhetorically rigid world, one where a Tweet has a style, a Facebook post has a style, an Instagram post has a style – and you cannot move between them very easily. There’s no way that these modalities can cross between one another. Very frustrating.
However in the days of LiveJournal I could post a picture with a short comment, a one or two line (160 characters) comment on something, or a very long blog post.
I think that using this blog like I used to use LiveJournal is going to improve the quality of my posting, or at least give me some rhetorical variety that I am just now realizing I miss from direct social media.
People do use Facebook like a blog, but it’s really not the same thing. They are able to really rail against the things they hate – political and otherwise, or make extreme statements because they know the exact limits of their audience. They only post to those who are of a certain bent or position, so they are able to really push views that are not well constructed, thoughtful, or considerate of oppositional viewpoints.
But a blog, like this one, can’t relax in that way. I have no idea who will read this, so I have to write to a “universal audience” – the theory that I have to imagine a typical person who reads critically and thinks about what they are reading, and attempt to write in a way that makes sense for this “subject” which I construct from my own experiences as a 21st century citizen writing for whoever is “out there.”
This is better than pandering, i.e. writing for the lowest common denominator to get views and clicks. Sometimes on Facebook and other social media you see pretty smart people doing this. Social media makes us very lazy when it comes to rhetoric. It might be directly responsible for the very poor quality of our public discourse and public political discourse today. We don’t have to adapt, and we mistakenly confuse social media audiences for a “public.”
LiveJournal had all the good elements of social media and you could post publicly too. I really miss it. I will try to reform it here, making this a place to try to recover those norms of discourse from the earlier days of the internet.