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Pillow book crap
An episode of Nana talks about close friends and lovers picking up speech patterns from each other, and how this can be disconcerting sometimes. It's one of those moments of emotional realism that make the manga. There's the process of differentiation whereby A becomes the [insert social role] of the group and B the [other role], but at the same time your friends work their way into your habits of speech - as much to say, your patterns of thought - so that A finds herself saying (and thinking) what B would say (and think). To some extent you become one another, like bacteria swapping memetic material in lieu of genetic.
Obviously this happens on LJ too. XD I was thinking about this because the honesty meme told me a couple of times that I was pretentious. I don't particularly worry about this but it made me remember that I used to feel a number of people among my flisters were pretentious. It never made me stop reading anyone permanently, I think, and eventually I stopped feeling that way, which is interesting because I don't think any of the people in question changed their blogging style appreciably. It could well be that I started to blog more like them (hence the intro paragraph). It was truly a subjective feeling, and very difficult to define. I don't think it's that I perceived the persons to be self-aggrandizing or snobbish, or even that I felt personally excluded because they were posting re: "difficult"/intellectual/obscure topics I hadn't swotted up on. But there was a sense that they were being disingenuous - that they knew, or ought to know, that their audience weren't going to engage with what they were saying (it's much more a question of engaging than understanding), and that that being the case they were being selfish by going on the way they did. That the dishonesty is of someone pretending to engage you in dialogue, when they're really not, and are aware they're not. Of course an LJ nearly always has multiple audiences, and sometimes a given post isn't for one. But some people can natter on about obscurities ad infinitum without triggering that sense of alienation. The only sure way of telling whether you've engaged your audience is if they talk back, but one can't formulate posts as if artlessly expecting a deluge of comments no matter what the topic - that makes it worse. Conversely maybe it makes it better if one baldly prefaces with a "I'm basically rambling to myself now, but..."
I'm sensitized to the above because I don't hopefully imagine that I'm not a recidivist offender in this, but it's a variable after which I grope blind. I don't know how I sound to other people, and the more people friend/read me the more tone-deaf I get. ^^; For instance sometimes I reread my old posts and comments and am horrified because I sound so smug and condescending in them, and sometimes they're fine. I'm never even conscious of feeling condescending toward anyone, but then it's not so much an emotion as an effect on others (the emotion is defensiveness, probably - this sounds very Mr. Darcy). I can also be pretty insensitive but that conversely happens in cases where I'm trying to tread lightly and say the right thing. I've never said the right thing. orz One day, but not today. I should learn to keep my mouth shut but I do enough of that already, and sometimes it's not the right thing either.
Back to the topic, anyway: it's not unrelated to the anxiety of the null set post, or maybe it is the anxiety of the null set post - you're going on and on and not only does nobody know what you're talking about, no one cares. Or maybe you're having too much fun, so much so that you don't even care anymore whether anyone else cares, and that's when people start thinking you're pretentious. Pageblank, my favorite blog du jour, notes this as the fundamental difference between geeks and hipsters - hipsters are geeks grown socially adept to the extent that they internalize "whether other people give a shit" as a tracking variable and have strategies for outflanking it, including but not limited to the preemptive attack of (the infamous hipster) ironic distance, i.e. it doesn't matter if you don't give a shit because I don't give a shit either, even if I clearly do - and everyone else knows this but it's okay because we are all in the same boat, being giant geeks, lulz and eksdee. By this metric a lot of the self-identified geeks I know are really hipsters, and some of the self-identified - not hipsters, no one self-ids as a hipster, but sophisticates - are really geeks. But I think this is, well, true. XD I sounded considerably geekier in the dawn of the Pitas age, even if I was often posting on less stereotypically geeky topics, because I had that oblivious geeky certainty that anything I thought was awesome was objectively as awesome as I thought it was. And intermingled with a lot of fangirl Japanese.
ON A RELATED TIP: if you've friended me recently (i.e. within the last several months), please say hi and tell me what you're here for! If you haven't yet and feel like it, anyway, it's not a demand. XD
Obviously this happens on LJ too. XD I was thinking about this because the honesty meme told me a couple of times that I was pretentious. I don't particularly worry about this but it made me remember that I used to feel a number of people among my flisters were pretentious. It never made me stop reading anyone permanently, I think, and eventually I stopped feeling that way, which is interesting because I don't think any of the people in question changed their blogging style appreciably. It could well be that I started to blog more like them (hence the intro paragraph). It was truly a subjective feeling, and very difficult to define. I don't think it's that I perceived the persons to be self-aggrandizing or snobbish, or even that I felt personally excluded because they were posting re: "difficult"/intellectual/obscure topics I hadn't swotted up on. But there was a sense that they were being disingenuous - that they knew, or ought to know, that their audience weren't going to engage with what they were saying (it's much more a question of engaging than understanding), and that that being the case they were being selfish by going on the way they did. That the dishonesty is of someone pretending to engage you in dialogue, when they're really not, and are aware they're not. Of course an LJ nearly always has multiple audiences, and sometimes a given post isn't for one. But some people can natter on about obscurities ad infinitum without triggering that sense of alienation. The only sure way of telling whether you've engaged your audience is if they talk back, but one can't formulate posts as if artlessly expecting a deluge of comments no matter what the topic - that makes it worse. Conversely maybe it makes it better if one baldly prefaces with a "I'm basically rambling to myself now, but..."
I'm sensitized to the above because I don't hopefully imagine that I'm not a recidivist offender in this, but it's a variable after which I grope blind. I don't know how I sound to other people, and the more people friend/read me the more tone-deaf I get. ^^; For instance sometimes I reread my old posts and comments and am horrified because I sound so smug and condescending in them, and sometimes they're fine. I'm never even conscious of feeling condescending toward anyone, but then it's not so much an emotion as an effect on others (the emotion is defensiveness, probably - this sounds very Mr. Darcy). I can also be pretty insensitive but that conversely happens in cases where I'm trying to tread lightly and say the right thing. I've never said the right thing. orz One day, but not today. I should learn to keep my mouth shut but I do enough of that already, and sometimes it's not the right thing either.
Back to the topic, anyway: it's not unrelated to the anxiety of the null set post, or maybe it is the anxiety of the null set post - you're going on and on and not only does nobody know what you're talking about, no one cares. Or maybe you're having too much fun, so much so that you don't even care anymore whether anyone else cares, and that's when people start thinking you're pretentious. Pageblank, my favorite blog du jour, notes this as the fundamental difference between geeks and hipsters - hipsters are geeks grown socially adept to the extent that they internalize "whether other people give a shit" as a tracking variable and have strategies for outflanking it, including but not limited to the preemptive attack of (the infamous hipster) ironic distance, i.e. it doesn't matter if you don't give a shit because I don't give a shit either, even if I clearly do - and everyone else knows this but it's okay because we are all in the same boat, being giant geeks, lulz and eksdee. By this metric a lot of the self-identified geeks I know are really hipsters, and some of the self-identified - not hipsters, no one self-ids as a hipster, but sophisticates - are really geeks. But I think this is, well, true. XD I sounded considerably geekier in the dawn of the Pitas age, even if I was often posting on less stereotypically geeky topics, because I had that oblivious geeky certainty that anything I thought was awesome was objectively as awesome as I thought it was. And intermingled with a lot of fangirl Japanese.
ON A RELATED TIP: if you've friended me recently (i.e. within the last several months), please say hi and tell me what you're here for! If you haven't yet and feel like it, anyway, it's not a demand. XD