I’ve never really got­ten away with one-liners on this blog. It’s weird. A large part of that is because I’m an old wind­bag that doesn’t know how to write a sen­tence with­out a ridicu­lous num­ber of clauses, but… the proof is in the pud­ding; they should all lead some­where and make more sense more clearly than shorter sen­tences would. It’s about me not trust­ing you, dear reader, to have half a brain for your­self and under­stand what I am say­ing. I imag­ine that, by speak­ing (that is what char­ac­terises this medium of blog­ging more than any­thing else — as with instant mes­sen­g­ing, it is more about an ongo­ing con­ver­sa­tion than a pro­tracted series of epis­tles) more, I leave less to chance, less chance of mis­un­der­stand­ing, misinterpretation.

And I find this to be true of most other blogs I have perused in the past, with the obvi­ous excep­tion of com­pletely sim­ple statements/one-line com­men­taries to be found on posts that con­sist solely of a link to another site, and a sum­mary comment/quip. Those aren’t blogs, though, they’re link-logs. Or what­ever you’re going to call them.

Finally, I’m engag­ing with LJ peo­ple and am increas­ing per­plexed as to how one is expected to inter­act in such an envi­ron­ment. All is nor­mal, mun­dane, draw­ing a-heck-of-a-lot-of-comments; then there is a peb­ble (it is only a peb­ble) dropped onto the placid sur­face of a tightly strung mem­brane, pulled taut by dozens of inter­ac­tors (com­menters) who play a role in the blog con­text. It bounces.

Crack.

I pic­ture it like ice, because that’s a dra­matic image that appeals to me… shards, stress-fractures, mov­ing across its sur­face at incred­i­ble speed. It’s not really like that, how­ever. The sur­face is sim­ply released from the edges. It’s like those para­chute games you’d play as a kid… imag­ine peo­ple let­ting go of the edges — the peb­ble, or author (actu­ally in my orig­i­nal metaphor it was the author’s pithy-one-liner post: either ana­log will suf­fice), is left in the mid­dle beneath sheets of canvas.

Per­haps I mis­con­strue the response. Even beneath that can­vas there is, per­haps (again), a sub­ter­ranean response that goes unseen — that is, email, phone calls, SMS, IM con­ver­sa­tions… I speak of an elec­tronic com­mun­ci­a­tions ecosys­tem only, for it per­plexes me to think that any­one could or would use a let­ter to deal with such things: this, how­ever, betrays my per­sonal con­text: I am male and no longer at an age where I encounter my clos­est friends at school everyday.

But, it appears, this peb­ble bounces and causes those who were active to fall silent. Respectful.

That’s how I feel about it. That’s how I excuse it in myself.

As an alien, it is not my duty to respond… it would be inap­pro­pri­ate, engag­ing too much, likely to attract dis­dain, scorn. So afraid we are of being seen to reach out.

And I can’t help but won­der what would hap­pen if I were to start post­ing the same kinds of one-liners I see all over those kinds of very-age-specific social net­works, here. Would some­thing explode, scar­ing all com­menters away? I like to think I mix it up enough here that I scare every­one away equally… or rather, there are occa­sion­ally things that will inter­est all, but I have some­how man­aged to free myself from the con­straints of writ­ing for an audi­ence. This is post 966, by the way. That’s devel­oped writ­ing… not good writ­ing, just devel­oped. Hope­fully as I do so more I’ll under­stand the medium bet­ter… for me, yeah, there is a medium. Blog­ging is not use­less (anymore).

Even Live­Jour­nal is use­ful in its own (dif­fer­ent to this) way… it’s chiefly social. That’s the thing about hosted ser­vices over DIY jobs. DIY jobs are the best. Yeah, Word­Press counts as DIY. The point is, there’s no social facil­i­ta­tor in place. This isn’t Face­book or MySpace or Live­Jour­nal. It doesn’t have any hooks into them (excep­tion: LJ’s awe­some OpenID is del­e­gated to from this page), there’s no way to build links. I’m still an out­sider tech­ni­cally, if not oth­er­wise… LJ blow-in that I am and have been. But they’re out­siders, too. They’re out­side every other social net­work on the planet. It’s that which I find most strik­ing about social net­works… they con­tinue to facil­i­tate frag­men­ta­tion! Each cries out, “join our clique!” … and they often do.

Some are using Blog­ger, or even (MSN) Spaces. There are no social net­work­ing hooks between ser­vices. None of that group of friends uses RSS: they’re still man­u­ally check­ing (if, indeed, they do) these blogs. No con­ve­nient index-login-screen to say friends have posted new things. No attention-drawn to pithy one-liners to be ignored (or responded to in some hid­den way?) The whole sit­u­a­tion is utterly per­plex­ing. And now I feel how I imag­ine a soci­ol­ogy stu­dent must.