So, apparently people are already getting upset because I culled my ‘friends’ list on LJ down to the handful of people I’ve known for over a decade. I thought it was a pretty straight-forward thing. I took off people in the kink community on account of I’m celibate again and won’t be participating in any kink or kink-related or kink-community-related activities for the foreseeable future. I took of the NaNoWriMo people on account of they mostly hate me, and have either stopped posting or left me ‘out of the loop’ for over a year, now – I probably ought to have removed those names sooner, but … I’m lazy. I removed a couple of gay friends-of-friends, whose names I probably ought to have removed a long time ago, since I’ve only ever met them a handful of times, long ago.
The ‘friends list’ is not really anything to do with “friendship” – it’s just … it’s like an RSS aggregator, for pulling together one kind of data you want to stay updated on. And I don’t use RSS aggregators, really. And blogs … don’t have a lot of data, livejournals less so on average. Mostly memes and lists of things people did and birthday wishes, for most of the people I removed… and the bulk of the LJ’ers, who I will never, ever add. I don’t need or want to be kept up to date on what you had at Starbucks this morning, what comic book angel or superhero you scored as, or the latest funny YouTube video. I certainly don’t need to read your daily affirmations or stories about your pets/children being cute (all pet owners and parents see their pets and children as more cute that I do – even if I’m interested in meaningful details about your family’s life, seeing pictures of innocents with objects on their heads gives me no great pleasure). Oh, and then there are the virtual strangers; people who I don’t really know in life and don’t consider myself to be able to know simply via their online journal. I stopped reading outright strangers’ blogs and online journals years ago. The closest things I do now are read two or three columns by online columnists whose sites now allow “comments” (which I don’t participate in, I’m not much for comments, myself). I’m not interested in the daily lives, personal details, personal emotional struggles, et cetera et cetera of total strangers. Reading your journal doesn’t make us friends, and if I thought it did, you’d probably consider me a “stalker,” or at least “delusional.” I’m not really interested in the same things of near-strangers, acquaintances, people I haven’t seen or spoken to in longer than the span of time from our first contact to our last. Yes, if we run into each other again, see each other online, accidentally call each other when going for another number (whatever), I’ll be glad to talk, get together to hang out, help you build or move something, whatever. But I don’t want to read every little detail of your life.
Which may indicate something about why I haven’t been posting as much in the last couple of years; perhaps I just do not see the point in the bulk of what gets posted about. Perhaps I cannot comprehend the concept I just followed blindly for so long, this … blogging. Perhaps I am living in the wrong century.
Regardless, the culling of such a thing called a “friends list” is not an attack, not a hostile action, not petty or hateful or even personal. I don’t want to read your blogs just like I don’t want to read ANY blogs, really. I leave Zoe & Amy on here, myself, and Marie. Maybe Marie. Depends on if her posts feel like too much, and I want to get rid of them, too. She usually has a pretty good signal to noise ratio, though, and had been a relatively low volume of late, so … maybe. Amy posts once or twice and then not for months, almost always about her health. Zoe posts a little more often, but has reverted into the sort of posts that originate the word “blog” – they’re just links to interesting things he found online – and the occasional important post about something really meaningful, but the volume is almost as low as his wife’s. And me? Heck, I don’t read my own posts after I post them, I just want to be sure they ‘got through’ as it were.
If I were less lazy and uninvolved I’d just give Zoe a call from time to time, maybe spend an afternoon with him once in a while, and I’d take Zoe & Amy off the list, too. Stop cross-posting. Let this old, useless LJ account dry up, shrivel up, and fade away. Alas, I am lazy, and they are busy, and we’re not quite there yet.
