F-lists and intimacy

[pecunium]

Lj is not real life.

Big shock to read that right?

Of course not. Most of us don't conflate the two, much. It can be a large part of life (the net has eaten a lot of my reading time. Lets me keep up with, and be more active in, politics, for one; as well as allowing me to stay in better touch with friends far away, and has; magically, let me make friends with people (like soldiergrrrl and geekchick: whom I never would have met othewise, get to better know someone like athenais as well as make the pseudo-intimate acquaintance of lots of the others on my f-list. I can talk shop with desert_vixen get emotional support from killslowly, do something nice for rivka and get abuse from people who think they understand me because I said something which fits into their pre-conceptions of someone who says the sorts of things I say (ponder my beliefs... read my info page... imagine the room for misconception which arises.


But it isn't real life.

And part of that is the fault of LJ. Most of you aren't my friends. Not really. This is not a slam at you. It isn't meant to say you aren't nice people. Capable of being loyal, caring, blunt, intimate, reserved, supportive and aloof; as needed, to your friends. It isn't even to say that you aren't willing to do that for me, or anyone else on your friends list. But you don't have to.

There is no work at being a friend on LJ. A couple of keystokes and "boom" as if by magic someone is your "friend

But they aren't.

Being a friend takes work. It takes time. It takes risk, because it takes intimacy.

The last is the part which makes the soi disant Friendship of Lj so dangerous, because the level of intimacy can be one-sided, but not apparently so. I have a friend, who happens to be on Lj too. She told me, more than a decade ago, that she loved getting letters from me, because she could hear me talking.

I've had people unfriend me, because they couldn't do that. It was, perhaps, my fault. I tripped on the false sense of intimacy, and made an observation which was taken amiss. It might have ended there, but to take the possible sting out of it I poked fun at myself. The person didn't "hear," that and thought I was not only making a critical comment, but also impling a lack of wit.

What I found interesting in the subsequent exchange, was the hurt I felt at being tossed aside. I didn't know this person, but I enjoyed reading what they said, we have interests in common, and I felt a loss that I was no longer privy to the thoughts and ruminations on those subjects.

With a real friend, this wouldn't have gone that way. Hell, with a physical acquaintance it probably wouldn't have gone this way either, but a place like Lj makes it so simple to just disappear someone who gives one a momentary discomfort. A quick couple of keystrokes and they are gone.

There are other problems too. No one gets to see anything anyone else doesn't want to share. If one doesn't know me in real life, one doesn't know what I think, do, like, love, hate, despise, support, believe, unless I put it in print. Even that is scant information, I am not likely to write things which cast me in a bad light (take the example above, it may be I said something truly hurtful... unless I tell you to whom I said it, and when, you'll never see it, unless you happened to be on that person's f-list and saw it)

Even for the most revelatory of people, Lj is a self-seving, and shallow, slice of who we are. Time will make up for some of that (we inadvertantly reveal more than we intend, esp. in the offhand comments we make. I am certain (and have been for decades) that I say far more about myself than I think I do when I illustrate a point in a response with anecdote), but in the main we are seen as through a glass darkly.

by way of example, barring those few of you who know me well, in person, and over the course of years, the lot of you would be hard pressed to say anything much about my family.

But we feel intimate. I know that jonquil loves flowers, and shoopping at the Farmers' Markets in San Francisco. I know that dtaylor used to work at renassaince faires and had the doctor give her a souvenir recently. I know that lahermite's husband died a year ago (and my condolences again, may his memory be for a blessing).

But none of this means I know them.

Any more than I know Ben Franklin, Robert O'Niell, Elizabeth I, or either President Bush.

And yet... I do. All of you touch me. In ways small and grand, every one of the people I read (and that includes people like Steve Gilliard and others who write blogs which also include aspects of their private lives) touches me, and gives me some sort of support, not unlike that I get from real friends.

Sometimes they smack me upside the head with things I've ill-thought(akirlu does this without remorse, then again, we've known each other for the greater portion of our lives, and I count her among my dearest of friends... a nice thing about Lj is that I am in better touch with her, and those other friends of mine, whom I can't see enough of in person, than I could otherwise be, but; as is my wont, I digress), sometimes they rouse my sense of awe; or wonder, and I am lost in the glories of world because of them.

Sometimes they are just there. A touch of the commonplace, and a breath of another human being, when I was otherwise without company.

So, all in all, Lj is a net-benefit. So long as I recall that I don't really have 187 friends.

Comments

[ladymeow.livejournal.com]

I really liked this entry. It's very true and poignant.