Philosophical Advice

[muninnhuginn]

or, maybe, prescient advice from a philosopher

Yesterday's quote of the day from Quote Me On It was a few choice words from Socrates:

"Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in, continue firm and constant."

Maybe it ought to be prominently displayed on all LJ pages relating to "friends".

Comments

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

indeed!

'friends' on LJ is a bit of a misnomer. It can mean both 'people who want to read what I write' (or 'people whose writing I want to read' but LJ shows them both with the appellation friend) and 'people I'm happy to see things I count as personal'. Interest and trust may not be so commutative and the mechanism is relatively crude. Someone can 'friend' you and will then see things that you post and you can only stop that by specifying a whitelist of who can see it, when you might actually want to say 'anyone except these five people can see this'.

True friends stick with you through thick and thin and they'll support you even if they don't always agree with you. sometimes you get that connection from the moment you meet, sometimes it takes longer; sometimes you can only say things to a stranger and after you've said them you feel less comfortable with that person and you may never get to friendship from initial confidences (which contradicts the usual way that we get to intimacy with people by sharing mutual confidences). Especially online, you don't get to see all of someone when you first meet and the parts that you see may click with you but you might find out that's a very small part of them, that the other parts of them get in the way of you really becoming friends.

Precisely

[muninnhuginn]

I've always worked on the "over the school gate" rule: if I can't imagine saying it to an acquaintance in the school playground, then I won't post globally. And I'm far more careful about the locked posts. But then I also keep a conscious distance with the annoying first person plural pose--which reminds me where I'm doing this (I don't use the royal "we" the rest of the time). The choice of word is perhaps unfortunate and the mechanism crude, but even if there were another term and finer tuning, I can't see all the problems folk seem to have entirely going away.