Ghost Ships
Feb. 17th, 2005 08:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloI 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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2005-02-17 06:24 am (UTC)An ocean full of drifting hulks and only here and there a ship under sail.
Wonderfully put. You have a gift for finding romance in the mundane.
One of my LJ friends had friended someone who died of cancer last year. After hearing of her death I went to her LJ. The last post was written by her husband, who thanked everyone who had supported her in her fight. It does have the eerieness of walking through a dark graveyard or forest, in a sense.
I agree with the above post, that these journals provide a wonderful opportunity for social research, not only anthropology but nearly every academic field. It'll be interesting to see what it's capable of revealing.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-17 08:22 am (UTC)