debka_notion

There are several people I'd like to put on my friends page whose writing I find interesting and appealing, and whom I'd certainly like to get to know better in that wonderful abstract way that the internet provides. But I don't know them well enough so that I feel like it isn't an imposition- they're not complete strangers, we've certainly met in person, but not people I really Know. Or well, know at all, really. Meeting someone once qualifies someone as a not-stranger, not as someone I know. So- I'm too sheepish to put them on my friends list, even without putting them in the assorted custom groups I use to not bore some people to tears, or to be able to babble about other things in single-gendered contexts, etc. Same thing happened with the several people currently on my friends' list whom I know in similar ways (Steve, Steve, and Steve, all of whom I added when they expressed interest in me so I didn't feel ridiculous)- all pretty much through the same set of mutual Real-Friends. I don't want to be a weird intruder. Ahh, the dilemmas of public fora for personal communication.

(Anyone else think that dilemma should have a really strange plural? DOn't know what it would be, but it somehow seems to be calling for an ARabic-style irregular plural form.)

This is what comes of the combination of being a. rather passive, b. a fan of pen-pal set ups, and c. admirous of and interested in one's friend's friends. Oh well. Someday I'll either just add them on whim or something. Probably I'll wait until I write something that's actually interesting though...

One of hte points I Was going at though, was that I have these wonderful mini-groups set up so I Can aim things at audiences of people to whom I'm actually close, people whom I actually know, just people on my friends list, etc. But I then can't figure out how to fit people into those categories fairly or evenly, so they're all a mess. That's the problem with these systems: it's impossible to remember how you're sorting people over time.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Date: 2005-01-03 07:34 pm (UTC)

From:

tirerim.livejournal.com

no subject

Well, putting them on your friends list doesn't force them to read your journal. There's been a lot of discussion about the term "friend" as used by LJ, and how it's really a misnomer, and eventually they may switch to a more refined system, with separate categories for "people whose journals you want to read" and "people who you trust to read your locked entries", and drop the use of "friend" entirely, since it has way too many connotations for what it actually means.

Date: 2005-01-03 07:37 pm (UTC)

debka-notion.livejournal.com

That's sort of the problem- it isn't that it forces them to read my journal, but it seems like a violation of privacy in some way, even though they're putting it out on the internet, that's the idea, in some sense. I feel like it's making a claim on someone, even though technically it isn't, and I don't want to do that to people who may not like such attention.