Friends like these

[j4]

As far as I can tell, nearly everybody on LiveJournal thinks that calling the list of watched journals a "friends" list is a big glaring misnomer. But fortunately most of the people I know aren't naïve enough to infer from the liberal (mis)use of words like "friends" and "community" that by joining LiveJournal they will instantly enter into a glorious utopia where they're showered with love by people who were previously strangers to them.

Unfortunately, this doesn't make it any more pleasant when people who I regard as real friends in real life decide to tell me that I'm a worthless friend because I don't follow up to their last post on LiveJournal. I didn't realise that when they voluntarily joined LiveJournal I had entered into a contract to a) read every new update to their journal as soon as it was posted, b) follow up to every post, c) guess that a fairly generic-looking paddy about the technical crapness of LiveJournal and NTL is actually a hugely emotional trauma about the failure of a community to nurture and support them, or d) chase them up on email and implore them to return to LiveJournal.

If people don't want to use LiveJournal, then fine. I don't see it as an alternative to friendship, merely another way of keeping in touch with people. Some of my friends don't have mobile phones, so I don't text them. Some of them don't use email, so I phone them and meet them face-to-face occasionally instead. If a friend decides, for example, that having a mobile phone is a bad investment of their time/money, then I'm not going to run after them screaming "NO! NO! Don't give up the mobile phone! How will I ever keep in touch with you?", I'll just contact them another way.

That is, if they still want to keep in touch.

Comments

[acronym.livejournal.com]

It may be no coincidence that the friends from school I'm still in touch with are the ones who got e-mail accounts in 1996. Livejournal may well be starting to go the same way as more and more social events are being organised via this medium

I'd noticed this, which is why I started reading LJ. It's not a medium I'm very comfortable with, but there's a large degree of social pressure when the majority of one's peer group is using it - not least because it's assumed that everyone is entirely up to date on the minutiae of each other's lives as a result, which is not really a safe assumption. When people are having to participate in a medium they don't really enjoy in order to avoid being excluded, then you know that within that community, it has critical mass. The problem j4 describes then happens; the unspoken assumption of the biggest LJ fans that everyone is constantly up to date with it begins to tread on peoples' toes, and you have a large number of people using the service with very different expectations and frequencies which they are naturally going to tend to project onto other people. The upshot of this is, as ever, that people get hurt; that seems to be a universal constant.

The LJ concept of friends is pretty confused, too; I'd (waves hands) guess that most people are actually close friends with maybe 10% of their friendslist, if that. It's really a "subscriber" list.