Metablogging about Blogging

When I started blogging nearly six years ago, I didn't understand how important it would become in my life. My first LiveJournal entry notes my uncertainty about what I was going to do with a blog (in slightly dismissive terms that always make me chuckle in retrospect). If I recall correctly, I signed on mostly because I had a couple of friends who had blogs, and I had a vague idea that as a system administrator, I should keep abreast of some of these technologies the way end-users experience them.

It's fair to say that my social circle expanded by about 500% within my first year on that service. I wasn't unaware of the rather large population of potential "people I might have something in common with" out there; I just had lacked a medium in which I could make connections that mattered to me. IM and hookup sites and various other things hadn't really called to me; even Usenet had palled after about six months. Suddenly I was hooked, but more than hooked: the connections really did go both ways.

Like a lot of queer men (though not just queer men) the blog environment did become a dating service as well as a venue for other social interactions. As many of us have noted, though, blogging put dating (and sex) into a more comfortable zone than cruising on more traditional hookup sites. By the time I slept with someone I knew from LJ, I usually knew them fairly well. Sex, while still fun as "just" sex, usually wasn't "just" sex, but friendship by other means.

I was always as prone as anyone to online drama. Maybe more so. I learned a great deal, in my first couple of years on LiveJournal, about my own propensity to get sucked into other people's excesses of feeling, and my own capacity for generating more heat than light. The number of occasions on which I felt overwhelmed and pondered dropping out was large; once a month wouldn't be a bad guess. But for a long time I was aware that hanging in was forcing me to confront some of my difficulties dealing with my own feelings, let alone others'. Growth wasn't always easy or pleasurable, but it was growth.

Somewhere in 2005 and 2006 I suppose I hit my stride. Early 2006 was the last major time I smacked myself with acting out my "issues" on line and losing a friendship over it.

In retrospect, it seems likely that my personal trajectory mirrored larger community trends.

Other web communities (MySpace, Facebook) or technologies (Twitter) began coming to the fore. Those of us who had moved into blogging during 2003-05 began to move elsewhere. Sometimes it was a matter of finding something that worked better for each individual than blogging; sometimes it was a matter of having wrung everything out of the blog experience; sometimes people left under a cloud, whether one they created themselves, or one generated by others that felt too suffocating.

I hung on through these changes, regretting the absence of many people I'd enjoyed interacting with easily and quickly in blogspace--even if I kept up with them via other means--but still deriving benefit from the relationships that remained.

About a year ago things started to change. Maybe it was just my own personal growth; having one more pointlessly negative interaction with someone I was misunderstanding, or who was misunderstanding me, no longer felt like a growth experience.

But I suspect there was a broader change going on as well. Blog interactions, at least on LiveJournal, are capable of all the intellectual and emotional depth one could hope for, but that was never the majority of the interactions. Some of it was just fun ... and some of it was, always, just kind of annoying or poisonous.

Many of the more thoughtful, calmer people moved on a long time ago.

I've been hanging on because the rush of discovering how many people might enjoy interacting with me, back at the outset, was so powerful. I'd *never* felt that connected to so many people .... even at times when the connections were difficult.

These days, I have more trust in the idea that I can establish close connections, but I notice that many of my blog connections are *not* particularly nourishing. Some of that is my doing: I don't have as much time to invest as I used to.

But some of it just is what it is.

Kubler-Ross's grief stages would be appropriate here. I would say that I am getting to "acceptance."

Clearly, LiveJournal is not the only "blog" venue out there, as a post here indicates. For a long time, it did have a feeling of community that I haven't turned up elsewhere .... and yeah, I've gone looking.

Part of the process of accepting that some of what was there is gone and won't return, though, is the realization that some of it, I don't need or want any more. At least, not enough to put up with some of the downsides, even if those were always there too.