Taking a new look

[susandennis]

The latest LJ outage gave me a nice pause to stop and consider why I keep my journal here and what I keep in my journal here and what I expect out of keeping my journal here and what other alternatives might there be and am I interested in them in addition to and/or instead of. I pondered. I considered. And I'm probably not done yet.

I started this sucker up one day just as if I picked up a blank book and a pen and started a journal that way. It was just a way to chronicle the Me of the Now. For no particular reason except, I just like having it documented.

Along the way, I discovered others with the same thoughts. I read their journals often and added them to my 'friends' list as a way to more easily access their entries. Many of them actually became friends. It was years, literally, before I ever met any one of these people face to face. Then I started adding lots of people to the page that held the entries of others. It was great for years.

My latest ponderings had me take many many people off that list of people who's entries I read regularly. I think mainly I'm separating my journal writing from my reading of other people's journals - kind of.

The journal writing has become such a habit that I can't not do it. Should something happen to LJ long term, I'll just flop right over to http://susandennis.blogspot.com and keep on keepin' on. For now I'm here and happy to be here.

I'm on google plus and happy to be there. I kind of check Twitter now and again. The vast majority of everything I do online is publicly available. I'm delighted to have everyone read but turns out I'm not so dependent on it. If they read, great. If they don't, fine. It's the writing of it that's my piece of the rock.

I am not finished thinking about this. I may well go back and repopulate my friends list at some point. But that's the joy of The Me Of The Now. It'll change in 1... 2...

Comments

[johncomic.livejournal.com]

As always, you rock The Now!

[susandennis]

awww thanks.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

It does seem to Going Around, doesn't it?

I don't think that's a bad thing, any of it, although it's generating a bit of "oh, noes, you can't all go way!!!" angst here and there among my acquaintances in various social fora. But stopping and considering why and how we use this stuff, what we want to get out of it, what we want to put into it - and how that's working out for us - feels ... right.

My LJ friendslist has sort of trimmed itself over the last year - an awful lot of people have either killed their LJ accounts or simply stopped posting. I'm fleeing FaceBook, in part, because I let myself accumulate a whole bunch of "friends" who aren't, really, and who clog my FB page with stuff I don't care about - games, YouTube videos, silly links - without ever adding any original content.

Still sorting it out for myself, too. Best of luck to us both. (-:

[jawnbc]

I'm glad you're here. I prefer LJ to stand-alone platforms. So I'm trying to port stuff over to Dreamwidth just in case...

[susandennis]

Thank you. I have an offline copy of my journal here as my just in case :)

[howeird]

I hear you. I'd be in the same space except for a hunch. The hunch is that this is just a temporary problem, and it will be fixed soon enough. LJ just needs that extra clue to hire the help they need.

Just my opinion, but for me LJ is the best place to journal. FB is great for keeping in touch with my far-flung family and theater friends, and making bad puns. Google Plus is too new to tell, I'm just not seeing its value yet. Dreamwidth is buggy and the amateur email news updates don't build my confidence in them. Twitter is for quick thoughts and I mostly use it to follow a handful of famous folk.

Like you, I keep a local copy of my LJ. I wouldn't cry too much, though, if I lost the posts.

[vasilatos]

Carl Rogers said the act of creativity isn't complete until it has an audience. I think about that a lot.