Re: Set up LiveJournal community?

Mary K. Kuhner <mkkuhner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I conducted a small natural experiment on "do you really 'know' someone whose
journal you read?" Several female aikido practicioners keep journals on the
Women in Aikido website. Some are just logs of "what did I work on today?"
but some are highly narrative, talking about personality conflicts,
inner fears, etc. There is a little cross-talk among the journals: I
might say "I reacted to X just like so-and-so reacted to Y." But there
is a convention of not writing direct responses to journal entries, though
discussion threads on the site do come back to the same issues.

After about two years of reading each others' journals and participating
in discussions together, two of these women and I shared a smallish hotel
room for several days at an aikido event in Florida--the first time any of
us had met in person.

I knew these folks. No question about it. I could have predicted the ways
we'd get on each others' nerves as well as the ways we'd get along well.
It was interesting seeing them in person--they didn't meet my preconceptions
there--but it didn't lead to any major re-evaluation of our relationship.

You are an Arisian, able to reconstruct the entire universe from
examination of one pebble, AICMFP.

I thought this was a pretty good test because the event was something of
an emotional pressure-cooker, so we were not as much on guard as
if it had been, say, a beach vacation. I think every one of us
slunk off the mat on the edge of tears at least once. So I figure that
if we had fundamentally been strangers, it would have been quite
noticable.

I wonder to what extent you were extrapolating, and to what extent there
was a genuine, albeit indirect, conversation going on. And to what
extent your "I knew these folks" reflects the kind of knowledge you are
interested in acquiring, rather than the kind I'm interested in.

It's becoming clear that "I know N" (where N is a person) means
different things to different people. Which suggests the question: if
many people are interested in Q (some Quality), do LJ writers
deliberately (or unavoidably) reveal Q in their writing? And is this Q
enough to cause their readers to feel they "know" them?

Or do all LJ writers reveal Q1, Q2, Q3... and the sufficiently astute
reader (not me, alas) extract whichever Qn they are interested in?

It's possible I'm being entirely too pessimistic about how much it is
possible to glean from a LJ. (It's a little bit like AI: given a bit
of effort, I'm sure I could prove that vision, using light, is
impossible as there isn't enough information in an image to properly
disambiguate a scene. OTOH, eyes seem to have evolved more than
once ... <g>)

Jonathan
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Set up LiveJournal community?
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