An Anniversary, Ms. Havisham Style

[cbertsch]

Well, this journal has made it to another year. This is my sixth anniversary here. But it's also the most bittersweet, since many of the friends I looked forward to reading have abandoned the site and others only post infrequently. As a measure of how things have changed, I almost went back and changed that "here" in the second sentence to "there," since most of the comments I get these days come indirectly, via the "notes" I import from Live Journal into Facebook. Sigh. It depresses me, because there are many things about LJ that I still dig, despite its many problems, from the ease with which concentric circles of friendship -- intimate to casual -- can be managed to the comment threading that still makes Facebook's implementation seem ridiculously lame. And I say all that despite a pretty strong hunch that my life would have gone a lot better if I'd never taken the plunge into personal blogging. Anyway, here's the tally, for what it's worth: 3267 journal entries, 13,849 comments received and 11,350 comments posted. I wonder if I'll make it to 4000?

Comments

[jstgerma.livejournal.com]

You know, it's funny, I used to read this on LJ a lot (not from the start, but probably going back four years now), but now that you post it on Facebook, for whatever reason I usually read it there. And I don't like commenting on Facebook stuff, because I'm too aware of the visibility of everything that gets said there.

It's interesting to hear you say the thing about personal blogging. I've never had nearly the complications you have, but I've often felt the same way, probably to a lesser degree.

[cbertsch.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I wonder if that's true of other people who now read me on Facebook. Some actually comment more there than they did here. Facebook comments tend to be shorter, I've noticed, and less engaged. Or maybe that's just my problem!

As far as personal blogging goes, I'm not sure what to think. I set out to do it with the specific intention of learning about the complexities of social networking. And I have, certainly. But I've found along the way that the flak I got from those who disapproved, especially in a professional context, and the changes that my presence here led to in my "real-world" relationships contributed to a change in my self-image that was probably not for the best.

[e4q.livejournal.com]

actually, i nearly did! it's where i first read it, but due to the content i thought i would wait and comment here.

[cbertsch.livejournal.com]

I try to do that when I see an LJ entry imported to Facebook before encountering it in its "natural" state. Sometimes I forget, though.

[jstgerma.livejournal.com]

That second part is something that bothered me, and led me to make my blog public again and to make the content bland. It got to the point where people I hardly knew (or didn't know at all) knew things about my life that some close friends didn't. I also didn't have anything left to say in real-world conversations with people who read it. So I've always been interested to see how you manage your online persona via implication and euphemism, the suggestive images and occasionally cryptic prose.

[cbertsch.livejournal.com]

I sometimes have these grandiose ideas about what I'm doing, what I've been doing all along. And since I had them pretty much from the beginning, or even before I started, I suppose they would count as the product of authorial intention. But having to sustain that kind of project while also presenting glimpses of one's actual existence is difficult. I am reminded of Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, which is both entirely fictional and kind of like an autobiography.