Re: Set up LiveJournal community?

Jonathan L Cunningham <spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I answered the "why have this particular livejournal community" rather
than "why have livejournal at all."

Did you? I see only one post from you in this thread, and it consists
only of a followup to Catja's suggestion about links to useful posts
in rasfc. Maybe your answer is in a thread I haven't read, or maybe
my newsserver (normally reliable) lost it.

Branching off from Brian's message about four messages back, Elizabeth
said something and in reply I commented that the lj rasfc community is a
great way to track down the livejournals of people who hang out here.

(I love my tree view!)

If you think you would like to get to know certain people that you have
met here better,

I'm not sure if you mean what I mean by "get to know". Perhaps I'd
use one of the phrases "understand better" or "know more about". (Which,
to my mind, are subtly different things, and both a unsubtly different
from "get to know".)

Um... okay. I seem to use the phrase differently then.


What does "get to know" mean? To my mind, it implies a two-way process.

Does it? Why?

So, to "get to know" someone through their LJ, I would also have to
write a LJ (and they would have to read it). Or not?

Well, that would be entirely possible, if you feel that its required.

I don't, for example, believe it's possible to "get to know" anyone
just by reading their LJ. (Similarly, it's doubly impossible to get
to know a TV personality.)

*shrug* Okay, whatever.

I think I'm going to try again.

People come here, because they are interested in talking about sf
composition. People friend people on lj, I assume, mostly because they
are interested in that person, or at the very least, what that person
has to say. That makes lj seem inherantly more friendly and intimate...
it's more about people, and less about subject matter.

A lot of people seem to do livejournal as a way of maintaining contact
with friends who do not live close enough to make regular face to face
contact possible. I think I may be using it to bolster the illusion
that I actually *have* friends. (I certainly don't have any of the kind
one has regular face to face contact with.)

Having evidence that at least a dozen people outside of my family are
interested enough in my life to volunteer to listen to me blather about
it, is amazingly cheering at times. (I have more people who have
friended me than that, but when a total stranger with over 300 people on
her friends list friends me, I tend to assume that my postings get lost
in the shuffle.) Listening to other people blather about thier
children, and jobs, and religious observences, makes me feel like I know
them better even if, by your grounds, I don't.

What livejournal communities are supposed to be good for I don't happen
to know. As has been mentioned elsewhere, they just don't seem as good
a place for disscussing things as usenet is.

--
Michelle Bottorff -> Chelle B. -> Shelby
L. Shelby, Writer http://www.lshelby.com/
Livejournal http://lavenderbard.livejournal.com/
rec.arts.sf.composition FAQ http://www.lshelby.com/rasfcFAQ.html
.