Talon (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
talonkarrde) wrote2010-07-25 03:30 pm
talonkarrde) wrote2010-07-25 03:30 pm
Entry tags:
Who's That Trip-Trapping Over My LJ?
Let me tell you a story— wait, I’ve done that a lot, already. Let me tell you of something that I believe.
I will start here: I believe in the internet.
When I moved to my new middle school in the summer after fifth grade, there were about a hundred and something kids in the my class, and everyone knew more or less everyone else in their grade. I was new, and I needed to make friends, and despite struggling a bit, I did. We all did, back when we were middle schoolers, and this is what I’ve observed: we often made friends based on superficial things — taste in books, or TV shows, or movies, or bands we liked. ‘Hey, N ‘Sync’s new album is pretty good’ became a springboard to invite others over to enjoy other CDs in someone’s music collection; a shared interest in Starcraft became an invitation to LAN parties, and so on and so forth.
Memories were formed, though, and memories are important.
In high school, there were all of a sudden a thousand teenagers crammed into a building, or a few buildings. There were different levels of classes now, and many extracurricular activities, and new people to meet and hang out with, even if they weren’t in your grade. And so more friendships were made and fostered and developed, and the result was that we came out of high school with friends that we had been in clubs for four years with, or had taken all those hard AP classes with, and shared a good portion of our lives with. I made some pretty good friendships during those times.
And did we remember the middle school friends we drifted away from? I don’t know.
Then there was college, and for me, at least, college was about the reversal of expectations from high school. With 20,000 or so students, instead of seeing the odd person you didn’t know, it was about seeing the occasional person you did, and delighting in the “oh, you’re in my Chem 204 class, right? What’s your name again? I just know you sit three rows in front of me, sorry.” College, though, was also about joining debate and joining the newspaper — the official one, we had two or three other less popular ones — and taking a very limited set of classes with other people. And it was about living with other people, too, and that was sometimes good and sometimes bad; for me, luckily, more good than bad.
And there were the high school friends I didn’t really talk to anymore.
And now there is this magical thing called the internet, and perhaps you see where I am going with this. With each level of schooling, there were more people that I came in contact with, and more importantly, more people that shared the same and specific interests I did. In middle school, just sharing an activity with me was enough to establish a friendship on. In high school, though, you could find those with the same band of classes, those that did activities. With college, there were enough people that you could find someone that shared your major, your minor, and the exact three activities that you enjoyed doing. It stops after college though — you don’t get the same effect in your workplace.
Which is why they say that the friends you make in college will be there for the rest of your life.
I believe that the internet is the next step in this evolution. It has a incredible number of people on it — Facebook is around five-hundred million users, isn’t it? — which is a few order of magnitudes higher than my college. And the power of it is that through it, we can connect to those people that share the same incredibly specific interests as us. Online games like Skyrates and Echo Bazaar, authors like Neil Gaiman and John Scalzi, those are some of my interests, and the internet has allowed me to connect — and meet in person! — those that are, as I think of it, geographically distant (or near!) but personally compatible.
It allows us to connect to people that we never would have met, otherwise.
That doesn’t mean that there is no danger. As the news reports, and as we all personally have had some experience with this, not everyone is who they seem, and the cloak of anonymity is one that does not always bring out the best in people. But I believe that the inherent nature of the Internet should not stop people from taking leaps of faith, and from trusting. In college, and even in high school, there were people that you knew were not necessarily trustworthy or honest — and more hurtfully, there were those that you thought were, but later turned out not to be. The Internet presents the same issues. By that same token, in college, you knew you shouldn’t give your contact information out to anyone that asks; it’s that same judgment you should exercise on the Internet. But these issue themselves are not new issues, they’re simply extensions of privacy concerns we’ve dealt with all our lives. And that brings me to choosing who you associate with.
And my association is this: I believe in LiveJournal.
I believe in a group of writers that has a site to spill out their hearts and their souls and their secrets to others that they have not met, or have only met once. I believe in the idea where everyone writes for others to see, some locked only to their friends, others open to the entire world, for any person who stumbles upon their work to see. This is as close to a ‘club’ in college as there is, and there are amazing writers here doing amazing things.
We are different! There are those that write fiction and those that write non-fiction, and those that straddle the line and mix fantasy and reality in a way that no one but themselves can call the different. And we all have our little clubs and groups and cliques and preferences, and so there are those that are in fanfiction communities and those that are in mutual support groups and a million other preferences that they have. I, personally, do not choose to associate with all of those people — which means I haven’t gone deep enough.
I will end here: I believe in you.
I believe in getting to know those that take part in this little idea that came out of Gary’s mind, you see, because I think I’ve found those on the internet that are like myself. No, we don’t all think the exact same things — but what’s the fun in that? We don’t look for our identical twins when we look for friends. We just look for those that we share enough with, and I think I share plenty with all of you.
And whether you write fiction or nonfiction, poetry or prose, I think that we’ve exchanged enough here that I’d like to call you a friend. So to answer the question, who are the ones ‘trip-trapping over my LJ’? They’re friends, you see, present or future.
I will start here: I believe in the internet.
When I moved to my new middle school in the summer after fifth grade, there were about a hundred and something kids in the my class, and everyone knew more or less everyone else in their grade. I was new, and I needed to make friends, and despite struggling a bit, I did. We all did, back when we were middle schoolers, and this is what I’ve observed: we often made friends based on superficial things — taste in books, or TV shows, or movies, or bands we liked. ‘Hey, N ‘Sync’s new album is pretty good’ became a springboard to invite others over to enjoy other CDs in someone’s music collection; a shared interest in Starcraft became an invitation to LAN parties, and so on and so forth.
Memories were formed, though, and memories are important.
In high school, there were all of a sudden a thousand teenagers crammed into a building, or a few buildings. There were different levels of classes now, and many extracurricular activities, and new people to meet and hang out with, even if they weren’t in your grade. And so more friendships were made and fostered and developed, and the result was that we came out of high school with friends that we had been in clubs for four years with, or had taken all those hard AP classes with, and shared a good portion of our lives with. I made some pretty good friendships during those times.
And did we remember the middle school friends we drifted away from? I don’t know.
Then there was college, and for me, at least, college was about the reversal of expectations from high school. With 20,000 or so students, instead of seeing the odd person you didn’t know, it was about seeing the occasional person you did, and delighting in the “oh, you’re in my Chem 204 class, right? What’s your name again? I just know you sit three rows in front of me, sorry.” College, though, was also about joining debate and joining the newspaper — the official one, we had two or three other less popular ones — and taking a very limited set of classes with other people. And it was about living with other people, too, and that was sometimes good and sometimes bad; for me, luckily, more good than bad.
And there were the high school friends I didn’t really talk to anymore.
And now there is this magical thing called the internet, and perhaps you see where I am going with this. With each level of schooling, there were more people that I came in contact with, and more importantly, more people that shared the same and specific interests I did. In middle school, just sharing an activity with me was enough to establish a friendship on. In high school, though, you could find those with the same band of classes, those that did activities. With college, there were enough people that you could find someone that shared your major, your minor, and the exact three activities that you enjoyed doing. It stops after college though — you don’t get the same effect in your workplace.
Which is why they say that the friends you make in college will be there for the rest of your life.
I believe that the internet is the next step in this evolution. It has a incredible number of people on it — Facebook is around five-hundred million users, isn’t it? — which is a few order of magnitudes higher than my college. And the power of it is that through it, we can connect to those people that share the same incredibly specific interests as us. Online games like Skyrates and Echo Bazaar, authors like Neil Gaiman and John Scalzi, those are some of my interests, and the internet has allowed me to connect — and meet in person! — those that are, as I think of it, geographically distant (or near!) but personally compatible.
It allows us to connect to people that we never would have met, otherwise.
That doesn’t mean that there is no danger. As the news reports, and as we all personally have had some experience with this, not everyone is who they seem, and the cloak of anonymity is one that does not always bring out the best in people. But I believe that the inherent nature of the Internet should not stop people from taking leaps of faith, and from trusting. In college, and even in high school, there were people that you knew were not necessarily trustworthy or honest — and more hurtfully, there were those that you thought were, but later turned out not to be. The Internet presents the same issues. By that same token, in college, you knew you shouldn’t give your contact information out to anyone that asks; it’s that same judgment you should exercise on the Internet. But these issue themselves are not new issues, they’re simply extensions of privacy concerns we’ve dealt with all our lives. And that brings me to choosing who you associate with.
And my association is this: I believe in LiveJournal.
I believe in a group of writers that has a site to spill out their hearts and their souls and their secrets to others that they have not met, or have only met once. I believe in the idea where everyone writes for others to see, some locked only to their friends, others open to the entire world, for any person who stumbles upon their work to see. This is as close to a ‘club’ in college as there is, and there are amazing writers here doing amazing things.
We are different! There are those that write fiction and those that write non-fiction, and those that straddle the line and mix fantasy and reality in a way that no one but themselves can call the different. And we all have our little clubs and groups and cliques and preferences, and so there are those that are in fanfiction communities and those that are in mutual support groups and a million other preferences that they have. I, personally, do not choose to associate with all of those people — which means I haven’t gone deep enough.
I will end here: I believe in you.
I believe in getting to know those that take part in this little idea that came out of Gary’s mind, you see, because I think I’ve found those on the internet that are like myself. No, we don’t all think the exact same things — but what’s the fun in that? We don’t look for our identical twins when we look for friends. We just look for those that we share enough with, and I think I share plenty with all of you.
And whether you write fiction or nonfiction, poetry or prose, I think that we’ve exchanged enough here that I’d like to call you a friend. So to answer the question, who are the ones ‘trip-trapping over my LJ’? They’re friends, you see, present or future.
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Either I'm hormonal, or you're just that damn good. ;)
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Very well said.