Saturday, May 10, 2008

A small anecdote about the year 2001 and my introduction to the concept of "blogs"

So in the year 2001 I was a freshman in college. One day I asked a friend of mine how her weekend was.

"Didn't you see my last LiveJournal entry?"

I sort of kind of knew what LiveJournal was. As far as I could tell, it was exactly like a diary except anyone in the universe could read it. Which seemed completely at odds to the concept of keeping a diary as far as I understood it (writing down private stuff in a book you then hid so nobody else could read it). My thoughts on LiveJournal basically amounted to "Jeez that's dumb."

I knew that this girl kept one of these (she was actually a very nice, reasonable person aside from things like her Dashboard Confessional fandom and, y'know, LiveJournal), but I never read it because it seemed creepy. Like, well, reading someone's diary. And even if someone wanted me to read their diary, there's almost a 100% chance that I still wouldn't want to, y'know? I'm just as narcissistic as you: if anything I'm just gonna thumb through to see if I'm mentioned and then chuck it back under your mattress where it belongs.

So I tell her essentially that no, I did not read her last LiveJournal entry, and I don't keep up with her LiveJournal or anyone else's LiveJournal so I didn't already read about how her weekend was, but I'm asking her now, in person, so how was her weekend?

"It was..." She sort of sighed and thought for a second. "You should really just read my LiveJournal. It was a really crazy couple of days; I said it better there than I could right now."

So a couple of years later everyone starts talking about blogs, and bloggers, and "new media" and stuff. The way blogs are described they sounded pretty much like LiveJournal, so I dismiss them as pointless and hateful bullshit.

Postscript: I end up starting one out of boredom (and the fact that I was too lazy to start a zine, which was my original idea but would've taken way longer) and realize they don't have to have anything at all to do with LiveJournal, and I begin to hate them a little bit less.

If you are too young and/or too old to know what LiveJournal is, that's awesome.

15 comments:

mYmy17 said...

ur a good blogger huh???
nice.....

bradman said...

Yep and Wow.
Truly inspirational stuff here. I'll be back!
http://ahotnewthrillerthatshouldbeafilm.blogspot.com/

Death to Peanuts said...

The whole idea just became worse with the introduction of the Myspace Bulletin.

Now you can post like you would in a normal blog, but be horribly vague and only use 1-2 sentences...

Anonymous said...

I read your blog because I don't know you in real life. If I knew you in real life I would ask you if you wanted to get together for coffee so that you could tell me funny/insightful stuff in person.

I like blogs by funny/insightful people I don't know personally.

Or by my sister who doesn't really talk to me much. (And even reading that feels kind of creepy.)

Remember when people wrote each other letters?

ruadhaine said...

yep, love your outlook!

Joe said...

The best thing to do with a LiveJournal is to just post funny pictures on it!

MFajardo said...

the fact that blogs and diaries are meant to serve the same purpose makes the whole thing sort of ironic...

kittens not kids said...

i graduated from college in 2001.

when i started, we still had dialup internets!

i am Old!

i would read your livejournal, as long as you wrote in actual English, not in fauxnetics. u kno? lol?

how is robot mcgee these days?

inferno said...

Oh my golly gosh !!! (you can tell i'm English then eh)How come i never made that ironic connection between diarys and live journals before, maybe we should now all retreive and dust off our teenage angst scribbled diarys from out of the attics of the nation and splash them across the electronic pages of the global village (jeez, that would take ages for the one finger typists)i actually quite like the idea of that !.

Mathew Walls said...

WTF? LiveJournal is a blogging site. It's exactly like Blogger (except that the interface is nicer). Also, as you clearly point out, blogs and diaries do not serve the same purpose. One is a communication medium, the other is a personal record. In short, this post is shit.

Joe Mathlete said...

I'm not quite sure where you're coming from, Wallsy; I was just telling a brief story as a way of explaining why I was biased against blogs for several years (to sum up: my initial encounters with the medium led me to believe they were the domain of self-absorbed exhibitionists who sang along at Dashboard Confessional shows, an opinion that the three or four blogs I maintain ought to clearly indicate I no longer hold). I guess if it'll help make things less offensive/confusing for you, replace the word "LiveJournal" with "things like that girl's own personal LiveJournal" in the second- and third-to-last paragraphs.

Anyway, regardless of the fact that for whatever reason you took it upon yourself to write me a rude message, I like your cute little cape.

Mathew Walls said...

That does clarify things, thank you. It seemed to me that you were being unfairly critical of LiveJournal while using an almost identical service yourself, which seemed both hypocritical and rude.

Also, thank you, but it's not actually my cape. It's my cousin's, I just put it on for the photo.

Joe Mathlete said...

Wallsy-

Makes sense. I guess I've got a recent history about being pissy about fairly similar websites (MySpace vs. Facebook, etc), so things and stuff.

Annaimports - I was perusing your selection of Quilted bag and my web browser caught Hepatitis C. Please go to hell.

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