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Welcome back?
May. 12th, 2012 09:03 amI finally got myself to the point where I could make an investment in a new Scr@pple laptop. Truly, I point to the day that my old, defunct iBook bit the dust as the day that my blogging habit started to stale. The convenience and ease of use of the darn thing was paramount in my high usage of online forums and modes of communication. If I had still had my iBook when FB really started to get going, I might've (maybe) become an adherent like my sis wanted me to, rather than the ne'er do well ne'er log in type of user I am today. Now? Prepare yourself for a rambling meander of my thoughts on online social interaction. Be warned, I won't mention everything and will probably focus more time on some than others. Also, I may start out with some personal laundry airing that might've been part of the reason that I soured on LJ for a while, from which I had gained enough distance to resemble a fresh perspective and more positive outlook on the world of LJ. That, and this being my re-entrance into the world of LJ is why this will be made a sticky post for a while. To get the word out there, yes? So. Let us begin.
Act I
Last night, as I waited through a few hours of updates to download and process, I though about LJ and other ways of interacting online. I thought about whether I should continue on with a previously established persona (semiotic_pirate, of course) or if I should either use one of my other LJ identities (one created out of idiocy, the other created out of nostalgia), or even if I should start from scratch and create a brand new me.
The last option seemed overly onerous. I really didn't want to go through the hassle of figuring out a new user id, set up a new profile, and all the other bits and drabs of creating a new place for myself to interact with the circumscribed world of the LJ community. The other personas, triffid_talker and chatkitty were people I wanted to either forget ever tried to exist or outgrew, or both.
The first is one I created because I lost a friend on here (whom I had met and hung out with in person for a while). We had a falling out over a major difference of opinion that I thought we could get past but that they were adamant was a deal killer. That persona was only alive for a couple of months and was created primarily to still be able to see how this person was doing, because at the time I thought I cared and wanted to be supportive (and didn't see the creepy stalker way that the establishment of that persona could both be perceived as and... well... was. I mean really, what was I thinking?) Today, I place that action into some of the five stages of grief over the loss of the friendship: denial, a bit of anger, and bargaining. My denial of the severance of the relationship, my anger over the fact that it was over, and the sneaky sad skittering about on the edges of her life trying to bargain my way back into her circle of friends, even if I had to interact online through a doppleganger of myself in order to do so. The sadness itself I dealt with inside my own head. My letting go of that persona and the need to reconnect with that person embodied my acceptance of the lost friendship. Obviously, I couldn't choose to take up that persona again for any reason. And to the person that this had the most impact on, I apologize.
Chatkitty was an homage to who I used to be long, long ago when I first started to talk to people through the aether. This was the me I projected onto the wall of other people's screens in Compuserve chat rooms, on ICQ and other various platforms in existence at that time. I've lived a lot of life and been through many ups and downs since then; although I am still chatty, I don't really feel all that kittenish anymore. Kitty isn't really a name people take seriously anymore, it is too fraught with male gaze overtones.
For the most part, semiotic_pirate is still a comfortable suit that I can slip back on. Some of the seams are frayed, but they can be repaired. It is something that can both sparkle and be taken seriously, given the way that I have either accessorized or modified it at the time that I am wearing it. Is it a string of pearls, an eyepatch and cutlass, or a rolling up of the sleeves and hems while wading in the surf type of day?
Act II
For those of you in the know, the only recent/existing connection that I've had through the inter tubes to other people has been on Twitter. I guess I really liked the information sharing type of style and feel to the space (as well as the ease of use from a mobile device) when compared to FB.
LJ - of which I'd been a part of since around since its inception; I followed a couple of people, randomly popping onto the website and catching up with what they had written, for a couple of years or so before twigging to the idea that... Hey. I could create my own blog and natter on about things that interest me.
My truly N00B days of online social interaction are way back in the Compuserve chat room days, using ICQ for chatting as well. I miss chat rooms. Do they still exist anywhere? For me - THAT was the "Cheers" bar environment. Virtually walk into the room, shrugging on my persona, and interacting with the friends I'd made there. Maybe I'm being overly nostalgic, maybe the die hard New Englander in me liked the Town Meeting feel of chat rooms. Most of the interaction modes that I've found over the past decade are more one step or so removed from direct, live discussions.
With blogging... You may or may not be heard by people who may or may not be listening (following) in the large room that is the LJ platform.
With Twitter... You are in such a big room, with a lot of thin partitions that you can peer into while wandering endlessly. And people mostly walk around monologuing, or making a press statement about what's happening in their life and occasionally picking a person shouting back from a crowd to retweet into a reply. Although I've had miniature conversations with friends on Twitter, it happens very rarely. It really is more of a public soapbox for voicing your opinion, and those that stop to listen to you burble on about whatever has caught your interest at the time... well, it is more like a soapbox that floats through the room and other people, floating around on their own soapboxes can send off little follower twitter birds to flock around you like passenger pigeons gathering and dispersing messages to their caretakers.
As a reader of books, reading a blog post is like opening up a novella or short story about an individual. Sometimes its fiction, sometimes its biographical, sometimes its a newspaper or magazine article. It is typically a long form type of speech that is presented in a forum that is then (potentially) open for debate and discussion. Sometimes the discussion is no more than affirmation of the speaker's topic, sometimes it is acerbic retorts or downright mobbish action; the best result is when a thoughtful series of interactions occurs between not only the author and the readers, but amongst the readers themselves. My own personal experiences with the latter type have been highly enriching and memorable.
I think that what can be really great is when the various platforms work together. An example would be someone on Twitter, that I follow also on LJ, Tweets a link to a new blog post. Too bad there isn't a way (that I know of) to add a 'tickler' to that tweet to remind me later to read the post; this would come in especially handy if said post is friend locked as I usually read my Twitter stream on a mobile device rather than a laptop. [Though this may change, eh?] Also, this option is only good for those people who don't blog multiple times a day or daily, perhaps.
And what is the deal with aggregators? At one point I had such high hopes for them, but there wasn't any palatable format that I could find (this was at least three years ago, maybe there are better versions now). All I wanted was a program that would grab all the various blogs, from disparate sites, into one page like a huge version of LJ's friend blog roll. Especially if I could modify the variety of styles used into a single format for ease of reading.
Other places that I've heard about and have either only skimmed through or never experienced seem to be Pinterest, Instagram, Goodreads, Meetup, LinkedIn, and other places that people have been gathering and exchanging data. I'm a bit leery of the latter because of its newly acquired by FB status (privacy?).
What are some of the other interesting locales out there that some of you have found?
Alrighty then. Feels like I've written enough for now. I've started to run out of steam after releasing the valve on all that had been pent up overnight after chugging through all of the updates and whatnot on the new machine before really opening this platform and condensing all of my thoughts into words. Yeah. I murdered that bit of metaphor.
But really, I feel like such a N00B right now. I didn't have a plethora of html code, I can't remember how to mention people (not that there is a way for LJ to notify those people if they are mentioned in someone else's post... oohhh... IDEA!) that have inspired me here or that I wish to reconnect with. I don't have a bunch of articles on hand that I can point to and explain why I think they're important for you to go and read... YES. As you have figured out (and those of you who have friended me in the past may recall) I like to use the dot-dot-dot way of leaving the end of a sentence open in order to imply that I could say a lot more but choose not to and rather choose to let you, the reader, fill in what I might have said next.
In a little while, I'm going to have to go read through my friend page feed in order to find out what's going on and to comment and let people know to check and see what I've begun again here.
Act I
Last night, as I waited through a few hours of updates to download and process, I though about LJ and other ways of interacting online. I thought about whether I should continue on with a previously established persona (semiotic_pirate, of course) or if I should either use one of my other LJ identities (one created out of idiocy, the other created out of nostalgia), or even if I should start from scratch and create a brand new me.
The last option seemed overly onerous. I really didn't want to go through the hassle of figuring out a new user id, set up a new profile, and all the other bits and drabs of creating a new place for myself to interact with the circumscribed world of the LJ community. The other personas, triffid_talker and chatkitty were people I wanted to either forget ever tried to exist or outgrew, or both.
The first is one I created because I lost a friend on here (whom I had met and hung out with in person for a while). We had a falling out over a major difference of opinion that I thought we could get past but that they were adamant was a deal killer. That persona was only alive for a couple of months and was created primarily to still be able to see how this person was doing, because at the time I thought I cared and wanted to be supportive (and didn't see the creepy stalker way that the establishment of that persona could both be perceived as and... well... was. I mean really, what was I thinking?) Today, I place that action into some of the five stages of grief over the loss of the friendship: denial, a bit of anger, and bargaining. My denial of the severance of the relationship, my anger over the fact that it was over, and the sneaky sad skittering about on the edges of her life trying to bargain my way back into her circle of friends, even if I had to interact online through a doppleganger of myself in order to do so. The sadness itself I dealt with inside my own head. My letting go of that persona and the need to reconnect with that person embodied my acceptance of the lost friendship. Obviously, I couldn't choose to take up that persona again for any reason. And to the person that this had the most impact on, I apologize.
Chatkitty was an homage to who I used to be long, long ago when I first started to talk to people through the aether. This was the me I projected onto the wall of other people's screens in Compuserve chat rooms, on ICQ and other various platforms in existence at that time. I've lived a lot of life and been through many ups and downs since then; although I am still chatty, I don't really feel all that kittenish anymore. Kitty isn't really a name people take seriously anymore, it is too fraught with male gaze overtones.
For the most part, semiotic_pirate is still a comfortable suit that I can slip back on. Some of the seams are frayed, but they can be repaired. It is something that can both sparkle and be taken seriously, given the way that I have either accessorized or modified it at the time that I am wearing it. Is it a string of pearls, an eyepatch and cutlass, or a rolling up of the sleeves and hems while wading in the surf type of day?
Act II
For those of you in the know, the only recent/existing connection that I've had through the inter tubes to other people has been on Twitter. I guess I really liked the information sharing type of style and feel to the space (as well as the ease of use from a mobile device) when compared to FB.
LJ - of which I'd been a part of since around since its inception; I followed a couple of people, randomly popping onto the website and catching up with what they had written, for a couple of years or so before twigging to the idea that... Hey. I could create my own blog and natter on about things that interest me.
My truly N00B days of online social interaction are way back in the Compuserve chat room days, using ICQ for chatting as well. I miss chat rooms. Do they still exist anywhere? For me - THAT was the "Cheers" bar environment. Virtually walk into the room, shrugging on my persona, and interacting with the friends I'd made there. Maybe I'm being overly nostalgic, maybe the die hard New Englander in me liked the Town Meeting feel of chat rooms. Most of the interaction modes that I've found over the past decade are more one step or so removed from direct, live discussions.
With blogging... You may or may not be heard by people who may or may not be listening (following) in the large room that is the LJ platform.
With Twitter... You are in such a big room, with a lot of thin partitions that you can peer into while wandering endlessly. And people mostly walk around monologuing, or making a press statement about what's happening in their life and occasionally picking a person shouting back from a crowd to retweet into a reply. Although I've had miniature conversations with friends on Twitter, it happens very rarely. It really is more of a public soapbox for voicing your opinion, and those that stop to listen to you burble on about whatever has caught your interest at the time... well, it is more like a soapbox that floats through the room and other people, floating around on their own soapboxes can send off little follower twitter birds to flock around you like passenger pigeons gathering and dispersing messages to their caretakers.
As a reader of books, reading a blog post is like opening up a novella or short story about an individual. Sometimes its fiction, sometimes its biographical, sometimes its a newspaper or magazine article. It is typically a long form type of speech that is presented in a forum that is then (potentially) open for debate and discussion. Sometimes the discussion is no more than affirmation of the speaker's topic, sometimes it is acerbic retorts or downright mobbish action; the best result is when a thoughtful series of interactions occurs between not only the author and the readers, but amongst the readers themselves. My own personal experiences with the latter type have been highly enriching and memorable.
I think that what can be really great is when the various platforms work together. An example would be someone on Twitter, that I follow also on LJ, Tweets a link to a new blog post. Too bad there isn't a way (that I know of) to add a 'tickler' to that tweet to remind me later to read the post; this would come in especially handy if said post is friend locked as I usually read my Twitter stream on a mobile device rather than a laptop. [Though this may change, eh?] Also, this option is only good for those people who don't blog multiple times a day or daily, perhaps.
And what is the deal with aggregators? At one point I had such high hopes for them, but there wasn't any palatable format that I could find (this was at least three years ago, maybe there are better versions now). All I wanted was a program that would grab all the various blogs, from disparate sites, into one page like a huge version of LJ's friend blog roll. Especially if I could modify the variety of styles used into a single format for ease of reading.
Other places that I've heard about and have either only skimmed through or never experienced seem to be Pinterest, Instagram, Goodreads, Meetup, LinkedIn, and other places that people have been gathering and exchanging data. I'm a bit leery of the latter because of its newly acquired by FB status (privacy?).
What are some of the other interesting locales out there that some of you have found?
Alrighty then. Feels like I've written enough for now. I've started to run out of steam after releasing the valve on all that had been pent up overnight after chugging through all of the updates and whatnot on the new machine before really opening this platform and condensing all of my thoughts into words. Yeah. I murdered that bit of metaphor.
But really, I feel like such a N00B right now. I didn't have a plethora of html code, I can't remember how to mention people (not that there is a way for LJ to notify those people if they are mentioned in someone else's post... oohhh... IDEA!) that have inspired me here or that I wish to reconnect with. I don't have a bunch of articles on hand that I can point to and explain why I think they're important for you to go and read... YES. As you have figured out (and those of you who have friended me in the past may recall) I like to use the dot-dot-dot way of leaving the end of a sentence open in order to imply that I could say a lot more but choose not to and rather choose to let you, the reader, fill in what I might have said next.
In a little while, I'm going to have to go read through my friend page feed in order to find out what's going on and to comment and let people know to check and see what I've begun again here.
