Ghost Ships

[poliphilo]

I wonder what the average life span of an lj is. A few months I suspect. Many expire after a handfull of entries, some are never used at all. Already the lj universe is full of husks, space junk, ghost ships. To happen upon one is an eerie, Marie Celeste-type experience. Here's an info page, full of vim and pep and silly jokes and then you move to the journal proper and find that the last entry was written a year and a half ago.

The creak of the rigging, the cry of the gulls.

Sometimes the last entry contains a farewell, but that's rare, more often there's no hint of impending demise. The story just ends, the monologue cut off in mid flow.

Mostly one supposes, the writer just lost interest in their new toy, grew up, got a life, but on a simple law of averages some of these hulks must have been abandoned because disaster struck. So there's always the question, did something terrible happen here?

There are one or two ghost ships on my friends list. I should let them go, but superstition or sentiment prevents me. What if the owner returned to find herself friendless? How sad that would be.

There's going to come a time, I suppose, when the lj dead will outnumber the living. That'll be weird. An ocean full of drifting hulks and only here and there a ship under sail. At present lj is new enough for the dead to blend with the living- ignore the date in the header and you may not spot anything strange in the text- but give it a few more years and the ghost ships will be antiques, full of dated slang and gossip about forgotten celebs. Paris Hilton- who she? I find the future of lj- and indeed of the Net as a whole- almost impossible to imagine.

Comments

[sunfell.livejournal.com]

I joined LJ back in '01 to join a certian community (which I am no longer part of). My LJ drifted without posts for about a year, then I started to write, and found that it scratched that itch more than anything else. So, I post when the whim (or a good article) catches me. I share things I think might be interesting. If something is private, I keep it private, or don't post it at all.

I don't have an internal censor. I write what I want to, and if it offends anyone, they can go away. Or we can discuss it, until or unless the commentary in turn becomes offensive or they attack me. That hasn't happened yet- but I have the tools to take care of any trolls who might want to mess things up.

The 'ghost ships' that really sadden me belong to people who have been killed in the Iraq war.

But for me, writing is a calming thing, a stimulating thing- and something I would do one way or another. I kept journals in spiral notebooks and wrote letters by hand for years. Now, I have an electronic means to do so. If the lights go out and the dark ages return to the US, I'll return to my old standbys. I'll miss the keyboard, though...

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I used to walk around amusing myself by composing little articles in my head- and most of the time they never got written down, let alone published. It was as if I were marking time, waiting for the invention of the blog.