She should have run faster

Irritating me at the moment:

-"Let them eat cake" attitudes.

If you're lucky enough to be in a position of privilege which means you've never had to experience a given hardship, please don't prescribe behavior to people who have.

-The implication that bigotry is just a difference of opinion, and it should thus be no barrier to making friends with someone, especially if you have other things in common.

Let me guess: You'd also suggest that rabbits ought to try to make friends with cougars just because they're both mammals, right?

-The implication that fighting for one's rights and complaining about discrimination means you don't care about anything else.

It's true that sometimes people get oppressed-person's-myopia, and that does consume their every waking hour. But chances are good that if all you see about someone is that they're (insert trait here), it's not because they're making a bigger deal about it than they should, but because YOU are.

-The implication that having a non-standard gender or sexual identity, and being open and honest about that, means you're obsessed with sex.

Yes, said folks may on average be more aware of and in touch with their own sexuality, but that has jackall to do with how much shaggery they think about/want/have. Yes, Virginia, there are celibate queer folk.

And for the cherry on top of this: The implication that having a big interest in sex is a bad thing, regardless of one's gender or sexual identity.

Techno/Babble

LJ seems to be dying down in the last couple of years now that people are getting more into short-form stuff like FB and Twitter. Which probably means there aren't a lot of people actually reading this journal anymore, even if they still have it friended. Fair enough.

It also, however, means a lot of my own day-to-day babble is going elsewhere, too (both for format reasons and to try to reach a larger audience), which means most of what's going here is the long-form personal stuff that doesn't fit somewhere else.

Which probably means I'm boring the crap out of the people who actually are still reading it.

Ehm. Sorreh?

I spose it's kinda funny, though. Because I use different spaces for different things, exactly what picture one gets of me is going to depend a great deal on which of my online presences one sees the most:

If you only read here, you'd probably think I'm a navel-gazing whiner with a slight obsession with politics and social activism. If you only read my other journal, you's probably think I'm a mentally masturbating pervert. If you only read my Twitter feed, you'd probably think I'm a pop culture obsessive who never strays far from her TV or computer. If you only look at my Flickr account, you probably think I'm a globe-trotting travel fiend with a sideline in birding. If you only read my comments on political news articles, you'd probably think I'm a sign-wielding activist firebrand. And FSM only knows what you think if you're only reading the totally random crap I post on FB.

And if you never read anything I write online at all, you probably know next to nothing about who I am. ;)

Seriously, though....

It does kinda bug me that the more in-depth communication possible in this format seems to be a dying art. I "know" more people than I ever have before thanks to the shorter-form stuff, but my own personal monkeysphere can't accomodate deeper communication with everyone I contact, even if I want to (really, really want to, in some cases.) Trying to have a moment of human bonding in 140 characters with 213 people just isn't really possible.

The death of human contact predicted by technophobes when we first started toying with Usenet and IRC never really came true, because people were using it as a means of reaching people beyond their immediate neighborhoods, and thus making deeper connections than mere physical proximity can allow.

But I do wonder if we have started edging that direction, now. The means of in-depth, meaningful contact online still exist and always have, but people are using them a lot more rarely, now. Whether that's because we're pushing the limits of our monkeyspheres too hard or because we just don't give a shit anymore, I don't know, but it is kind of worrisome. Technology itself is not a barrier to human bonding, and can in fact be a facilitator for it. But only if we're actually using it for that purpose. If we're moving toward seeing other people online as just NPCs in some giant MMO, we're losing out.