Meta-journalling

I originally joined LJ because a group of friends I am on a mailing list with are active LJers, and I wanted to be able to read their entries here and comment on them. What I have discovered in the process of doing so is that, at least for the frequent LJers among them, I am coming to know them from a slightly different perspective.

The list that I and they are on has no topic restrictions, and we all post everything from interesting news articles to very personal rants, fears and life issues. You might think that the perspective would be much the same as that gained from reading LJ entries. But there are interesting differences. And I am enjoying those differences. It is giving me a wider and deeper glimpse into the lives of people I've come to see as friends, even though most of us will never meet, due to distance and my travel limitations due to multiple disabilities.

Which in turn is causing me to rethink my intended use of LJ. At first, I thought that I would primarily operate in comment mode - in essence, joining into conversations with people I know, much as I would on a mailing list. However, I've begun to wonder: if I am enjoying reading about the day-to-day stuff in the journals of my friends, being even more of a voyeur into their lives, isn't it... appropriate... for me to give them the same kind of glimpse into my everyday existence?

Of course, I may be wallowing in egocentricity here - but that's one of the basic issues of living on the Net anyway. And it's an interesting one. This is, I think, the first time/place in human society (since our very early days when all the society we knew was the other folks in our little tribe) where people begin from the assumption that they have something to say to others, that they deserve the opportunity to make themselves and their views widely known. That the sum of the moments of their lives matters on a larger scale.

Which has an interesting potential for the future of our political institutions - what do governments do when all citizens begin their civic involvement with the assumption that they have a right to be seen, heard and understood as individuals, not just as slips of paper in a ballot box or fractions of a statistic from the latest opinion poll? I know, this is not a new observation, but I think it may be more of a fundamental shift in Western attitudes toward the relationship of the personal and public selves than many people are aware.

All of which, of course, may just be my elaborate justification for inflicting my personal annoyances and mundane accomplishment on the rest of you. ;-)