This may seem like a dig at LJ, it's not. It's an honest expression of the strangeness I feel when I'm over on those blogs.
Okay, so I read a whole freakin' lot when I was young. The topics of that reading varied far and wide. Some of that biblioteching activities included reading Victorian letters and novels. So when I read many LJ Bloggers, I have this weird sense of deja-vue.
It's like a Victorian gossip sheet. Or is it just my warped perception? There's a lot of references to screen names which on LJ tend toward the anachronistic or at the very least acronymisms. It's like reading, "The divine Ms. Z__ entered the party late and conversed quietly in the corner with Mr. R__ and Mrs. G__."
Don't get me wrong, I read a lot of people on LJ. I also comment on many an LJ blog (I really don't keep my LJ blog going). I keep hearing about how "LJ is the place to be." I don't know about that. It certainly is more "communal" than other blog sites (as compared to individual blogs). I just have this feeling I need to go put on the poet shirt, gird my loins, buckle my shoes, and sally forth when I enter the land of LJ.
3 comments:
I like LJ pretty much for the communal atmosphere, though I get the same sort of vibe--though I encountered it in Russian lit of the salon, not so much Victorian England. But same sort of deal.
The other advantage to LJ is the built-in feed reader. Rather than having to go to dozens of sites, I can keep most everyone in one place (and with one commenting scheme), and read a bunch of non-LJ sites as well. Of course, these days I just post once to the blog, which then dumps an identical post in my LJ, because keeping them separate just seemed like an exercise in futility, but nobody seems to mind.
You know I always feel left out of the LJ clique system. I have an LJ account I use only for commenting on friends' LJs. The chasm between Blogger and LJ seems to be growing, though, not shrinking. It is, as you point out, as though different species -development is happening on distant continents.
Hey Dave, Russian Salon! That was the other type of lit I was searching for this morning. French Salon as well. The Victorian culture I was thinking about was America's Victorians and the yellow journalism rags that proliferated at the time. The friends page is pretty cool, but I have a drop down folder of the RSS feeds I read. It's nice to see the continuity of the postings for individual blogs.
Camille, that's what I use my account for as well. There does seem to be a cultural rift occuring. Maybe it's just a self-selective process (LJ's engine draws different folks than the Blogger Engine than the Wordpress Engine)?
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