The start of the dream.

[hannah]

I got an email this morning telling me that eighteen years ago, I made a Livejournal account. My Livejournal account can now vote.

Compared to some other long-standing accounts I have on other sites, I could almost trust my LJ account if it voted.

I don't think it was eighteen years ago to the day that I started posting, and though I don't much remember the posts themselves - and I'm not at all interested in going back and seeing it for myself, or anyone going to check it out and let me know what they think of it - I do remember the wild, raw feeling of connecting to people through the blogging platform. I miss the naiveté and comparative innocence of the internet back then, or at least, my perception of one very small corner of one specific region of it. Such things have been written about before, and better than I could manage on the topic, and they wouldn't resonant if they weren't so true.

I remember when my family got internet access in our house, my first thought was, "Wow! Now I can talk to people with similar interests outside of my own ZIP code!"

I work to keep a little bit of that hopefulness and optimism, no matter where I go. Sometimes it doesn't work out. Sometimes it bears through.

It was true with message boards and mailing lists, and while it's still true with Tumblr and Dreamwidth, it was never more true than with Livejournal.

Comments

[yourlibrarian]

I do remember the wild, raw feeling of connecting to people through the blogging platform. I miss the naiveté and comparative innocence of the internet back then, or at least, my perception of one very small corner of one specific region of it...I remember when my family got internet access in our house, my first thought was, "Wow! Now I can talk to people with similar interests outside of my own ZIP code!"

I first got internet in a school and then work setting, but can definitely relate to the world of interest groups and content now available so easily as a result. And I think the naiveté issue is one that was widely shared, even by academics (as I was in school reading articles on early Internet studies).

To me one big change then vs now is the likelihood that other people were treated as just that, like other people, instead of an "audience" or anonymous fictional beings that were strawmen for one to mistreat. I think that's not something really widespread in places like DW due to both its size and its legacy of former LJ users, as well as its very format. I think, too, on the flip side that there was a wider assumption that one could easily make friends online and probably a more realistic perspective today that people you share interests wih are not necessarily people you share much else with, and even long-running interactions can prove ephemeral.

[prettyarbitrary]

Yeah, I made mine in 2003 and I still miss it. Other platforms have never been quite the same.