(no subject)

[nigeltde]

Er I am laming up jiffy_spiffy's callout for lj lingo with my mistake-riddled comment spam. But It has caught my attention and may have some vague bearing on one of my imminently due essays so give me your deep thoughts!


flist is the first one I can think of. Maybe interesting to write on because of all the emotional baggage of the concept.

Frank the Goat is probably a corporate mascot more than a piece of lingo. I don't ever use it; but he has his own lj which might be interesting.

Encyclopedia Dramatica can probably help you more. Is the colour bar "is love" phenomenon a specifically lj one, do you know?



Also, ticky-box! A symbol of the "omgthings is funny!" side of fandom? A guarantee everyone can participate even if it's just to say "I was here!"

Interesting topic! I must admit to ignorance of what iawtc is though :-( [for the record it is "i agree with your comment"]



I suspect the capslock phenomenon, in the sense of organised joyfully ironic community spazzing (see eg capslock_stugh) originated on lj too. It borrows from macro language but it's not exactly the same (eg for the above example you need a dense understanding of the oeuvre of Fry and Laurie). Also different (?) is that pomos feature in a roughly equal relation to emos.

Speaking of macros, you might find this helpful.



GIP is a good one! IMO one of the different things about lj (and its clones from mailing lists, blogs, myspace, wikis, etc etc) is the importance of iconography and the etiquette and creative culture built up around it. Fans are really bloody fluent when it comes to visuals and those icon memes or, even more tellingly, that question "which of my icons do you most associate with me and why" are a really fascinating instance of the blend of image and text and love/squee that partly characterises the lj fandom community. See also "picspam"!



clarification: the way lj and its clones (greatest journal etc) are different from those other forms of internet community.......

Comments

[lastrega.livejournal.com]

'flocked' like the post you've linked to. :-)

[nigeltde]

ha ha ha true dat. And it's a highly charged term too!

[accio-arse.livejournal.com]

Anonymous love memes. Haven't seen them anywhere else but LJ.

[petrichor-fizz.livejournal.com]

Those are brilliant.

[nigeltde]

your icon is brilliant. What a combo!

[petrichor-fizz.livejournal.com]

Why thank you. Shamefully, I now can't remember who made it.

[nigeltde]

oh good one! The flip side, of course, being anonymous hate memes. Do you know which came first? I suspect they're not really used outside lj fandom, too, which is a community built around reciprocity, with all the attendant politics and tensions regarding who gets attention, who gives and who receives (heee! surprise buttsecks!), BNF etiquette, etc.

[accio-arse.livejournal.com]

I hate them both.

The love memes seem to be nice, but actually they're all about who they exclude, and who gets the names of their particular friends in first. You feel a pressure to join in because they're supposed to be about the love, but they're not really. They may be well-intentioned but they always turn into a disappointing bitchfight.

Ooh, aren't I bitter.

[nigeltde]

I've never participated in a love or hate meme for something of that reason. Maybe mostly because I get annoyed by requirements of anonymity--put yer name to yer words!--but also because of the exclusionary sheen to them you point out. I'm sure they are well-intentioned but fandom is so deeply social that BNF politics and attendant jealousies will never go away. LJ can precisely quantify your fandom desirability too, in numbers of friends and comments.

Even the hate ones and occasional flamewars are instances of select groups rallying together and cooing about either a siege mentality or the "I and my 1000 friends are right and u r wrong" thing.

[jiffy-spiffy.livejournal.com]

Ahhh, thank you for this! If I had seen it earlier, I'd have unlocked the post, as it's hardly a very private matter! It's interesting, so much of what I've picked up from eljay I take for granted. It's not until I step back, I see how complex it can be to people unfamiliar with it all ...

[nigeltde]

how did your presentation go? Was it to mostly muggles?

[jiffy-spiffy.livejournal.com]

Really well, actually, thanks to my caring flist!

And complete muggles. My friend in the class asked me what everything meant, even 'srsly'! Ah, bless the ignorant ...

[nigeltde]

SRSLY.