I'm a big fan of freedom of speech. I'm also a big fan of procrastination. The two would normally never conflict with each other if it weren't for that up-and-coming social vortex, LiveJournal.
For those of you who don't know what LiveJournal is (or Xanga or any other offshoot of this arcane institution), it is an online journal for the everyday person, but published on the Internet for all to see. Now that I've destroyed your shield of naivet and exposed you, let me do you the service of turning you off of it.
LiveJournals violate a sacred, virtuous code that has been established since people were able to write things down: The journal is where one writes down their most personal secrets and thoughts. Journals are never supposed to be read by anyone other than the writer. Journals are for your eyes only and - God forbid - someone ever get a hold of it, your "life" would effectively be "over."
To be fair, when we write (or used to write) in a journal, while we may have been loathe to anyone reading them, we wrote down things that we wanted to say to people, that we wanted people to know. Some of us might have secretly hoped that that special someone would open to page 12.
But that was the sacred agreement: The secrecy went both ways. In exchange for journals becoming your private, mute and opinion-less confessor, no one would ever know your deepest thoughts.
Then, some uppity person decided it would be a good idea to put it online in order to reconcile this egregious act of privacy. Hence: LiveJournal, the place where everyone gets to vomit their life story all over the Internet.
Hold the phone. This seems to be a reasonable innovation on the surface. It seems very cool: You finally get to peek at the guarded secret of every girl or boy you ever liked. Did they mention you ever? Did they write nice things? All the questions you ever had have the possibility of being answered.
Instead you wind up being extremely disappointed. Rather than import the same type of journal-writing that one might expect, LiveJournal writers never name names, and they are never straightforward. Just when you thought you could tap into the dark secrets of your friends, you find yourself wading through cryptic and senseless paragraphs that the author has passively aimed at people that will never know or care that they have been mentioned in someone's journal. Entering someone's Live Journal is, more often than not, an abject waste of time.
There are three types of LiveJournals. First, The Emo - nothing but whine and cheesy. The person is either gushing through the nose or prosaically complaining in an equally powerful fashion about someone.
Second: The Prose, Haiku, and Poetry Up the Wazoo. Adding another layer of cipher to the complexity of meaning, this LiveJournal user refuses to use anything other than a pseudo-Walt-Whitman-esque writing style to convey anything. The poems themselves are devoid of style, but they ooze with meaning and subtext that we'll never understand.
The third type: The Rambler. Too much time, an inflated sense of self-importance and no ceiling on word count somehow translate into a license to bore. We did not ask for your life story, pal.
The fourth type, of course, is The Legit. A diamond in the rough: to the point, and succinct. Interesting links and pictures are posted sporadically, people are addressed by name rather than the unspecified pronoun, and usually it turns out to be funny.
I was joking about the existence of the last one.
The point of this rant is yet another request to reclaim the status quo of the good old days, where whatever was written in people's journals stayed a secret. I'm tired of clicking on a link in someone's profile and find myself lost and up to my neck in their personal life.
And yes, it's my prerogative to visit your LiveJournal in the first place. But to tie this into my first paragraph, I like to procrastinate by checking away messages and AIM profiles (and who doesn't?). There used to be a time when I could scroll down my buddy list and have a good laugh at someone's wit. Now I have to navigate the buddy list like a minefield, lest I check up on someone and get drawn into their personal pit of despair.
Don't be an attention-whore and bait your away message with sympathy trips. I'm sure the world has something better to do than read something they weren't supposed to see in the first place.