Y’know, it’s easy to laugh at the kids on LiveJournal, finding a cruel humour in their naive teen angst, but while I’ll confess to raising a smile at things like the LJ Times it’s always occurred to me that there might be something quite important going on here. Not at the moment, but potentially, in the future, when they all grow up and get a clue.
This article in the NY Times is very interesting for an old skool (hey, check out my archives d00d! June 2000!) 30-something blogger like myself. The reporter has done what good reporters should and spent some time with these kids trying to understand what they do and why, and it’s possibly the best piece of journalism on blogging I’ve read to date.
Some quotes:
I was half-expecting a pimply nightmare boy, all monosyllables and misery. Instead, J. turned out to be a cute 15-year-old with a shy smile.
In daily life, most bloggers don’t talk about what they say online. One boy engaged in vociferous debates on Mideast policy with another blogger, a senior a year ahead of him. Yet the two never spoke in school, going only so far as to make eye contact in the halls.
In J.K.’s diary, revelations of insecurity alternate with chest-beating bombast, juvenile jokes and self-mocking claims of sexual prowess. From a teen poet, you expect angsty navel-gazing; it’s more surprising to find it in a jock like J.K. In one post, he analyzed his history as a bully during ”middle school, the time of popularity,” when he did ”things too heinous to even mention.” In response, a reader posted a long, angry comment, doubting J.K.’s sincerity: ”I don’t think you understand what hatred I used to have for you because of how you made me feel . . . you can’t go back in time, but you can try to make up for what you’ve done in the past.”
These dynamics are invisible to most adults, whether at home or school. Students occasionally show the school psychologist their journals, pulling up posts on her computer or sharing printed transcripts of instant messages. But the psychologist rarely sought them out herself, she told me, and she was surprised to hear that boys kept them. She called the journals a boon for shy students and admired the way they encouraged kids to express themselves in writing. But she also noticed a recent rise in journal-based conflicts, mostly situations where friends attack one another after a falling out. ”They think that they’re getting close by sharing,” she said, ”but it allows them to say things they wouldn’t otherwise say, to be hurtful at a distance.” When I mentioned the material I’d read about the girl who was cutting herself, she went silent. ”You know,” she said, ”I really should read more into these.”
And suddenly I felt all sympathetic and interested, so I searched out the LiveJournal of J, the main blogger in the article. Um. Think I’ll stick with what I know. [Update - see comments below. I didn't find J's blog after all but the fact remains this is a strange world that us oldies ain't part of. ;) ]
NYT link via Tom.