Twitter: Somewhat puzzled by this phenomenon, I asked a friend why he enjoyed it. The answer was that it amounted to a level of social interaction between emails/journals/blogs and chatrooms/channels/MUCKs. Which I can understand on an abstract level, but, sadly, even LJ is often too fast-paced for me to keep up with. So I won't be getting an account.
Facebook/Myspace: These have always struck me as far too sleazy to use. I don't recall which did it, but the notion of elevating one portion of your reading list into best friends seemed indicative of the sites' overall approach to social networking: a highly manipulative one.
Dreamwidth: I got an account, following Cyn ("befitting" there, and a dozen or so successive names here). So far I have been impressed by a few small improvements over LJ, including the semantic change from "friends list" to "reading list" -- not important in an objective sense, but important to me, given that I place a lot of emotion in the word "friend". But the thing that really perturbs me about LJ is the fact that (for non-users) it runs ads on my damn journal. So, here are highly personal entries that take me hours, days, and in one case a year to write, commercialized without my explicit approval, and with my implicit approval only because of the huge damn inertia (a justified inertia, I'll grant) of the friends with histories here. (Tragedy of the commons, right? An act which no single person would approve, a community will readily approve.) I really hope it catches on among my circle of friends, but since I can't reasonably expect more than a small fraction of them to seek me out on Dreamwidth if I stop posting here, I'll still double-post for the foreseeable future.
Oh, right, you're a graduate student too! How are you finding that? For my part (I'm working towards a PhD in physics), I find it draining but worthwhile. Whenever I hear stories from friends about the discussion sections they lead in the humanities, I feel a mixture of envy and relief: envy because the physics equivalent entails far less creativity and involvement (but a considerable amount of mastery of the subject, mind), and relief because the physics equivalent is, as a result, far easier. :>
no subject
Facebook/Myspace: These have always struck me as far too sleazy to use. I don't recall which did it, but the notion of elevating one portion of your reading list into best friends seemed indicative of the sites' overall approach to social networking: a highly manipulative one.
Dreamwidth: I got an account, following Cyn ("befitting" there, and a dozen or so successive names here). So far I have been impressed by a few small improvements over LJ, including the semantic change from "friends list" to "reading list" -- not important in an objective sense, but important to me, given that I place a lot of emotion in the word "friend". But the thing that really perturbs me about LJ is the fact that (for non-users) it runs ads on my damn journal. So, here are highly personal entries that take me hours, days, and in one case a year to write, commercialized without my explicit approval, and with my implicit approval only because of the huge damn inertia (a justified inertia, I'll grant) of the friends with histories here. (Tragedy of the commons, right? An act which no single person would approve, a community will readily approve.) I really hope it catches on among my circle of friends, but since I can't reasonably expect more than a small fraction of them to seek me out on Dreamwidth if I stop posting here, I'll still double-post for the foreseeable future.
Oh, right, you're a graduate student too! How are you finding that? For my part (I'm working towards a PhD in physics), I find it draining but worthwhile. Whenever I hear stories from friends about the discussion sections they lead in the humanities, I feel a mixture of envy and relief: envy because the physics equivalent entails far less creativity and involvement (but a considerable amount of mastery of the subject, mind), and relief because the physics equivalent is, as a result, far easier. :>