![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cellioA friend asked me about LJ last night. She commented that she's missing out on the grapevine by not reading it.
In thinking about it, though, I don't think that's really true. She said, for instance, that she wouldn't have known about the power surge taking out a bunch of our electronics if she hadn't been talking to an LJ friend, but that's not true. It's just that I hadn't seen her since then; I would have told her tonight if it hasn't come up otherwise, but this wasn't important enough to send email about.
Email is push technology. It's not as "push" as a phone call, but it's much more active than posting in an LJ, which is "pull". If you want to read it you do; if you don't; you don't have to. With email (I mean the personal sort, not mailing lists and spam), there is an expectation of a reply and perhaps a dialogue. Email says "you should read this"; LJ posts say "feel free to read this". It's a big difference.
There are some things that I'm posting on LJ that would have otherwise rated email. Some of my religious stuff would have gone out to select people in email (though written differently). Some of it still does, actually. I definitely would have sent out email to selected friends with the "where should I buy a computer?" question. There are probably others. The last joke I posted here I also sent via email to some people.
I do sometimes wish that my LJ friends wouldn't say "I saw that in your LJ" in front of non-LJ friends, because it probably makes them feel excluded. Oddly, saying "I saw your post on rec.arts.comics about X" doesn't cause quite the same reaction; I wonder if it's just that LJ doesn't have the penetration that Usenet has -- or had back when such a statement from me would have actually been accurate.
In thinking about it, though, I don't think that's really true. She said, for instance, that she wouldn't have known about the power surge taking out a bunch of our electronics if she hadn't been talking to an LJ friend, but that's not true. It's just that I hadn't seen her since then; I would have told her tonight if it hasn't come up otherwise, but this wasn't important enough to send email about.
Email is push technology. It's not as "push" as a phone call, but it's much more active than posting in an LJ, which is "pull". If you want to read it you do; if you don't; you don't have to. With email (I mean the personal sort, not mailing lists and spam), there is an expectation of a reply and perhaps a dialogue. Email says "you should read this"; LJ posts say "feel free to read this". It's a big difference.
There are some things that I'm posting on LJ that would have otherwise rated email. Some of my religious stuff would have gone out to select people in email (though written differently). Some of it still does, actually. I definitely would have sent out email to selected friends with the "where should I buy a computer?" question. There are probably others. The last joke I posted here I also sent via email to some people.
I do sometimes wish that my LJ friends wouldn't say "I saw that in your LJ" in front of non-LJ friends, because it probably makes them feel excluded. Oddly, saying "I saw your post on rec.arts.comics about X" doesn't cause quite the same reaction; I wonder if it's just that LJ doesn't have the penetration that Usenet has -- or had back when such a statement from me would have actually been accurate.
(no subject)
Date: 2002-06-11 07:01 am (UTC)I was thinking about the difference between my main communications modes: email, AIM, LJ, phone, and grapevine.
It doesn't seem to upset people when you hear things via email if they don't have it or they aren't on the list.
It doesn't seem to upset people when you hear things via phone.
It doesn't seem to upset people when you hear things via grapevine, if the data is correct.
When you comment that you "see" someone every day on AIM, that seems to kind of get to some people. Personally, I love the fact that AIM lets me keep in touch with
I also see what you mean, and I have a good idea of who you're talking about, and when that hit me I realised that I don't think that i'd be entirely comfortable with them being on LJ and being able to read some of my posts. It hadn't really struck me what difference there was in the minds of other people between hearing something via email and hearing something via LJ.
Hmmmmm, more stuff to think about.
(no subject)
Date: 2002-06-11 01:35 pm (UTC)On the other hand, 10 years ago it did and 20 years ago it definitely did. AOL really did change people's views of email -- they created lots of socialization problems on the net, but they did make email a routine concept for Joe Average. Before that I was accused of being "elitist" often enough that I knew it wasn't just one or two people with axes to grind.
Email was special and now is not. Then the web was special (1994 was very different from today) and now it's not -- even though the web, unlike email, really was accessible, technically, to everyone from the beginning. (All you had to do was download a client, but most people didn't.) Ditto chat rooms, I think, though I never got into that so it's hard for me to say. Eventually online journals will be ordinary, but they aren't yet.
(no subject)
Date: 2002-06-11 04:50 pm (UTC)Well, in both cases there was a fairly high barrier: you needed to have a computer and a modem and know what to do with them. Heck, I was at a university, had used Gopher a few times, and my advisor told me "hey, there's this cool thing called Mosaic I loaded onto the workstation..." and it still took me at least 6 months to really try it out. Of course, I haven't stopped using it since then :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2002-06-11 07:15 pm (UTC)Yes. But by the time the web hit, computers and modems had sufficient penetration that email was not unusual, yet the web was still obscure even though it had similar technical requirements. The difference, I think, is that email had been around for a while and the web was new. So maybe in several more years online journals will be considered common and ordinary, the way the web is now.