The New York Sophist

did you ever use LiveJournal? I miss it a lot.

The reason I miss it mostly is because LiveJournal existed prior to social media, and was a great way to have a social media style friends list and feed, but it was long form too.

LiveJournal though was only long-form if you wanted it to be that. Otherwise it could be like Twitter/X – a short one line post was totally acceptable. Composing for LiveJournal really, in hindsight, feels like freedom. We currently live in a very rhetorically rigid world, one where a Tweet has a style, a Facebook post has a style, an Instagram post has a style – and you cannot move between them very easily. There’s no way that these modalities can cross between one another. Very frustrating.

However in the days of LiveJournal I could post a picture with a short comment, a one or two line (160 characters) comment on something, or a very long blog post.

I think that using this blog like I used to use LiveJournal is going to improve the quality of my posting, or at least give me some rhetorical variety that I am just now realizing I miss from direct social media.

People do use Facebook like a blog, but it’s really not the same thing. They are able to really rail against the things they hate – political and otherwise, or make extreme statements because they know the exact limits of their audience. They only post to those who are of a certain bent or position, so they are able to really push views that are not well constructed, thoughtful, or considerate of oppositional viewpoints.

But a blog, like this one, can’t relax in that way. I have no idea who will read this, so I have to write to a “universal audience” – the theory that I have to imagine a typical person who reads critically and thinks about what they are reading, and attempt to write in a way that makes sense for this “subject” which I construct from my own experiences as a 21st century citizen writing for whoever is “out there.”

This is better than pandering, i.e. writing for the lowest common denominator to get views and clicks. Sometimes on Facebook and other social media you see pretty smart people doing this. Social media makes us very lazy when it comes to rhetoric. It might be directly responsible for the very poor quality of our public discourse and public political discourse today. We don’t have to adapt, and we mistakenly confuse social media audiences for a “public.”

LiveJournal had all the good elements of social media and you could post publicly too. I really miss it. I will try to reform it here, making this a place to try to recover those norms of discourse from the earlier days of the internet.

I have two things that I feel I have wasted years of my life on that I regret: The first is my time in intercollegiate debate, deluded that it was a place for teaching. It’s not. I either should not have done it at all, or done it at about 1/6th the amount of time and energy I put into it.

The second is Facebook. I spent a lot of time on that site, deluded that it was a place for engagement and conversation. it’s not. This one is new, and I’ll be happy to chat with you about it as well, but not on that platform.

While I was in Mexico teaching at the International Debate Education Association’s youth forum in 2012, I deleted my Facebook because I found it to be such a let down from places like LiveJournal and other blog-oriented sites. I felt that time people spent on Facebook could easily be spent on composing longer, more thoughtful, more rich sentiments about ideas. I thought that ending reliance on Facebook would encourage reflection and engagement rather than immediate switch-flipping or comments. Facebook was just like intercollegiate debate – it promised to be an international platform for the rich discussion of ideas but was more a place for people to show off what they already knew in unreflective ways.

I kind of wish I hadn’t deleted it because it would be nice to have some of those photos back, but it seems that once it’s gone it’s just gone for you, but Facebook keeps it somewhere on an old drive – I still can’t use my old email address on my current account because it is “in use by another account.” Strange stuff.

Instead of deleting my Facebook this time, I’m just going to use it as a portal to bring people here, where they can comment, or not, freely without the horrible social media environment.

Last time I re-created my account only because of intercollegiate debate (see how the life-regrets work together so smoothly?) because students would not respond to emails, or phone calls in a timely manner, but would respond to facebook messages nearly instantly. It was the preferred mode of communication about 5 years ago, now no students use it at all. Plus, I am not doing anything debate related anymore. So I’m not sure why I don’t delete it. I guess it might be to keep it open for some use I haven’t discovered yet. But Facebook probably will not become a good place; it will just continue to be the only place people share their political thoughts and simultaneously be the worst way to share your political thoughts.

Facebook is a place to windmill high-five yourself on your sick political takedown, or whisper to yourself “ooo burn” when you read your friend’s comment, 1 out of 271, on some thoughtless political statement uttered by someone you don’t know, or wish you didn’t know.

Oh it’s also making Mark Zuckerberg rich. It’s for that more than anything else. In the words of an old friend of mine years ago, “Why do people think Mark Zuckerberg should be the person who connects you to people you casually knew in high school?” It is strange that we are ok with putting this guy in charge of who is in our social circle instead of the better choices of time, geography, and fate. Relationships are kairos not chronos; Facebook is the latter.

There’s always the outside chance that Facebook won’t translate to traffic or conversation here, so then I’ll most likely delete it in 3 or 4 months if the numbers aren’t good.