on communication/the contimunity:

I can't write this post.

i know where it comes from and where it goes but it goes inside all kinds of other people and the things they said and their locked LJ entries and so on. the process went something like this:



-I took the Technorati annual survey, which I still get emailed every year even though I have been officially a Recovering Ex-Blogger since shortly after the 2008 election. It is full of questions about social platforms I don't use and, in many cases, have not even heard of. I never actually meant to be an internet luddite I swear to god

-mused aloud about whether I should be on site x or site y, but not site z obviously, and even when people say 'yes' the barriers surrounding my comfort zone seem not worth the effort of challenging

-this. Pause [while I contemplate the impenetrable cocoons of my fandom life, which has been so good to me these last few years, in ways that are off the map and way out in the woods and which I never intended to relate here.] Then two other LJ posts from friends, both locked, posted almost simultaneously; the second one I read was about updating my livejournal like it's 2004. The other was about the reasons updating a livejournal had become functionally not possible. Okay so I never felt like updating my LJ ever (I started on Deadjournal and still mirror there from Dreamwidth, and Deadjournal is the only one of the three I pay for an account on), but maybe there's a social-informational bioaccumulating toxicity that prevents one from updating a livejournal beyond a certain randomly-determined terminal point. It's in the social structure it emanates. Or it's in fandom. Or it's in what fandom [potentially] does to gradually poison the water.

[Also, cryo, here. I disagree with this in a number of respects but it's a hella interesting post.]

I know it's not fashionable to believe in the ghost in the machine, but in social media you kinda fucking have to. It was intuitive to me the first time anyone (a doctoral student I used to know) explained the concept to me, woven between Gibson and how opening an instant message client feels and her past life as a coder; of fucking course social media is imbued from the code up with its own, often unintended, social universe and social consequences. It is possible that none of these societies are inherently stable.

-I guess I'm not going anywhere new, socialtechwise, because it feels like staying where I am is enough to meet my meagre social needs. I have this history of paring some needs to the bone, not least social ones, because I can. All those times when you move and then settle in someplace else and immediately hook up a wire or a lack thereof and take your world back out of the box you packed it in - same handle or almost, same URL or almost, same people or someone, and that's all the continuity you have and conveniently also all the continuity you need?

[i want to smush the concept into 'contimunity', can this be a word now]

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation wikipedia link because too lazy to paraphrase

-I am at least using skype sometimes now, be it mostly to troll around with Fly? Please hit me up there and see if I can remember how to talk out loud. I am 'thene a'.

-ETA: http://lawandsexuality.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/being-inappropriate.html


unrelated frags;

[-and when I'm any new place I figure it takes time to have a sense of home, no way does it take less than nine months or a year, and it's partly the people and also partly not. It's partly that sense of adventure I am not feeling right now.

-I've always said I don't keep this blog for anyone but myself. I've discovered I also don't keep it for myself, not in the sense of actually valuing its contents; rereads of the long-ago just make me realise that I am an embarrassment to the human race but dear god do I know I needed to write that stuff at the time. My voice changed or I found it; it keeps changing, I keep finding it.

-belated two and two together regarding that one gem of a fic comment i got in 2004 about Dr Seuss and Les Miserables. just, wow.]