Re: Set up LiveJournal community?

In article <1hcmnx1.1nnu18c1h887wgN%spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Jonathan L Cunningham <spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Mary K. Kuhner <mkkuhner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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.

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

I sure don't think so. We had a ton of information. I knew that K. toughs
it out when she gets hurt, so when she hit her head on a stone pillar
and asked us to sit up with her for a while and see if she seemed
concussed, I knew that she was fairly serious, and also that bullying
her to see a doctor probably wouldn't work. K. knew that A. needs
women-only space, so she didn't invite her male classmates to our room.
A. knew that I feel a mix of secrecy and defiance about training outside
my own tradition, and teased me about it but only up to my comfort level.
(They have a great blackmail photo of me doing a throw my tradition forbids.
Fortunately my back is to the camera so that you couldn't really prove
it was me--though it was.) We knew that when stressed K. would eat junk,
and how far to go in pressuring her to eat real food. We knew that
if we implied that some of A's troubles were her own fault, she would
clam up and that would kill the late-night discussion.

We did learn some new stuff, for example that I found K's homework
much more interesting than my own (I had brought a PhD thesis to
read but ended up reading her textbook on color correction in
Photoshop instead). We had some tension over when bedtime was,
what to do when the towels ran out, and K. tended to get overstressed
and edgy in the evenings--but nothing very unexpected. I hurt
K's feelings by assuming she was my age, when really she's about
8 years younger, so there was some factual data missing--but that's
what you've been calling "not really knowing" anyway.

Interestingly, when I met people who were central to their journals,
like K's classmates and teacher, I did *not* feel I knew them. Only
the journal-author herself. K's teacher in particular was very
different in person than I'd imagined him.

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.

I'm still fuzzy on what kind of knowledge you are interested in
acquiring. What I ended up knowing was how these people would
respond to stress, and something about what to do about it. That's
pretty central to me. Also a good deal about what was important to
them in their lives.

Oddly, I didn't get a complete view of how good their aikido was or
how it would feel--when K. threw me I was surprised and impressed at
how confident she felt. She doesn't seem that confident in her
journal. A. was the opposite, more tentative in person than in writing.
But it's hard to write about really physical stuff like martial
arts.

But personally, I think there was an indirect and slow-motion conversation
going on. I know I have mental models of A. and (especially) K.
and sometimes think about situations in terms of "How would K. react
to this?" and "Am I behaving like K?"

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?

Well, the female aikidoka journal-keepers are a small and fairly
closed circle, so if one person starts including a lot of Q, others
may too. (Though there are also several journals which are 100%
"Today we practiced the second and third wrist controls." I don't
know much about those people, except in a negative way--they are not
the kind of people who write personal journals in public.) But I
don't really think about what my readers would want--I am keeping a
journal, not writing an essay. I don't think of it as a blog, even.
I write down some very boring things, like exactly which aspect
of the warmup exercises is giving me trouble--and if it troubles me
for ten classes straight, I write that down. If readers are bored,
tough.

The main concession to readers is that I sometimes gloss terms used
only in my tradition. But often I don't, and figure that if anyone
has been following these since the start she knows the jargon by
now, and anyway it doesn't matter that much.

It's possible I'm being entirely too pessimistic about how much it is
possible to glean from a LJ.

I can't tell, since I still don't know what you want to know. What
would you want to find out about me (or anyone) in person? "What
face did you have before you were born" type questions baffle me--
I can't answer that about myself let alone anyone else.

Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@xxxxxxxxxx
.

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