The Weird Wide Web 10 Nov 2005 11:31 pm
your cheerful thought for the day
LiveJournal’s odd. You never get to just quietly drift away from a LiveJournal relationship, or near-miss at a relationship, and let it die naturally. There’s that defining moment, however small, in which you choose to defriend someone or are defriended. I hate that.
My LJ friends list includes a dead person. We weren’t close, but still I cannot bring myself to drop her username from the list and tidy her away. If we have a pandemic flu, my friends list might include about five more dead people, if the statistics from 1918 Chicago are anything to go by. (Maybe I’ll be one.) And as time goes on, and the people we love are picked off by one thing or another, our friends lists and blogrolls will look more and more like memorials to the dead.
on 11 Nov 2005 at 12:13 am 1.Mia said …
But isn’t that just a continuation of what saved letters and scrapbooks and photo albums or yearbooks are or could be? Is it that the electronic medium allows for a different level of distance and acquaintanceship?
(I just stumbled across an email from 2004 from a distant friend describing all his hair falling out at once in the shower from chemo. He died six months later, and I still have that email somehow, although I wanted to believe what he did, that things were improving. And even though I know how the story ends now, I’m still not deleting the email (nor those that preceded or followed it.) I think the rolls of the now dead and inevitably so are worth keeping.
on 11 Nov 2005 at 12:25 am 2.Cam Sculpin said …
Is it? Probably. Maybe it’s just different because I actually see the friends list fairly regularly. The few mementos I keep are not usually in places I’m likely to stumble across them.
I guess I’m the odd one — I don’t actually have any yearbooks of my own, I rarely save paper letters, and aside from wedding-related photos I have hardly anything in the photo album. Scrapbooking strikes me as sort of strange. I threw out all my personal papers in 1996 and never really got the hang of keeping them again. (Oddly enough, in the shed there is a box of papers marked “Sentimental papers”, but its contents aren’t all that sentimental — it’s just stuff that isn’t financial.)
on 11 Nov 2005 at 4:38 am 3.Rechercher said …
My curiosity cannot be quelled: was my post a coincidence or an inspiration?
on 11 Nov 2005 at 8:54 am 4.Cam Sculpin said …
Both, really. I’d been kicking the thought around for a while, and started to reply with it to your journal when I realized it’d be better here.
on 11 Nov 2005 at 9:23 am 5.Ted said …
Still, it’s good to know that if I become a zombie or a vampire that you won’t drop me from your friends list. Unlike some people I know. *coughMikeKcough*
BRAAAAAAAINS…
Uh, that was just practice. *whistles innocently*
on 12 Nov 2005 at 11:38 am 6.Cam Sculpin said …
I have to say, in the last few days I have seen so many stultifyingly dumb political remarks made (not by any of my friends, who are all brilliant) that I’m starting to really like zombies. They are generally pretty quiet, and they are in favor of brains. For one or two people, this would be a big step up.
So, yes, zombies and vampires have their good points and they are welcome on my friends list.