(no subject)

[rivka]

What attracted me to LJ was the idea of writing about anything that interests me at the moment, without worrying about whether it's interesting to other people or appropriate to a particular locale. It's true that I'm aware of my audience - at first I tried not to have one, by not telling anyone I was keeping an online journal - but it's also true that I feel freed by the opt-in nature of LJ. If you're not interested in what I write, why are you reading my journal?, I ask my inner critic when it accuses me of being boring or precious or self-involved. And my inner critic has to shut up.

It occurs to me that while this is a feature to me, a LJ writer, to many LJ readers it's probably something more like a bug.

This post brought to you by a debate in alt.polyamory.

Comments

[kiya]

I got started in significant part because I wanted to be able to have people at some distance from me able to feel involved with my life and the random pointless stuff that goes on in my day without me sitting down and writing long treatises about the randomness of, "Hey, I'm doing laundry today!" and the like and send it directly -- there's a certain amount of, "If it's sent directly there's a certain amount of request-to-say-something-back involved", and that sort of obligation-weight was causing stress, so we're giving this way of going at things a whirl.

The facts that it also gives me a space to rant about random things and have some potential for feedback and lets me keep track of friends (I discovered the journals of some friends of mine, and I'm getting the blow-by-blow of their pregnancy now, for example) are mostly bonus.