Reality vs. LiveJournal

[mbarrick]

OK, the reorganization of the friends list is done. I've refined my filters as well. I've tried to do this without causing offence. It should be borne in mind that LiveJournal and reality, or cyberspace and meatspace more generally, are two different things. There are people I quite like face-to-face whose journals I never want to read, there are journals I enjoy reading that belong to people I will likely never meet, and shades in-between. From my perspective, adding or dropping a person here is only, at best, tangentially related to my relationship with a person in real life. It's just a forum. I don't take offence when people leave the Van-Goth or GothicBC mailing lists, when people come and go from the GothicBC bulletin board, or when people drop their cell-phones in puddles and lose my phone number.

Image if in 1952 someone kept a list in their wallet of who they were friends with, adding and crossing people off the list. Imagine this person pulling out the list in a social situation like a cocktail party, making a great big scene about crossing someone off the list. I imagine everyone at the party would be thinking, "What a nutbar." Now imagine if the person who was crossed off said list flew into a tizzy over it, took offence not only at the nutbar with the list, but at everyone still on the list, pulled out their own list and equally flamboyantly crossed people off in spiteful retaliation. I don't know about you, but if I were the host I'd be ushering these people out the door and would be awfully hesitant to invite them back.

The word "Friend" is misused on LiveJournal, but "Journals I read" and "People who regularly read my journal" are a bit cumbersome. If I were monitoring a variable in code I was debugging I would call such a thing a "watch". "Friends" in the context of LiveJournal are only watches and watchers.