{"id":64,"date":"2009-03-03T16:27:12","date_gmt":"2009-03-03T23:27:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.lemongrass.org.uk\/lemongrass\/?p=64"},"modified":"2009-03-03T16:27:12","modified_gmt":"2009-03-03T23:27:12","slug":"the-sad-thing-about-plurk-and-the-happy-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.lemongrass.org.uk\/lemongrass\/the-sad-thing-about-plurk-and-the-happy-thing\/","title":{"rendered":"The sad thing about Plurk, and the happy thing"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have been enjoying Plurk<\/a> since June 2008 and have found people there of whom I have become very fond.\u00a0 They are individuals, but they’re also a group.\u00a0 I have received and given an awful lot of emotional support there which has been helpful in many ways: helpful in avoiding depression and defusing anxiety; helpful in learning more about people (really a lot – I understand a lot more about the emotional life of women now than I ever did before, for example); helpful in terms of feeling valued.<\/p>\n

One of the troubles with Plurk, though, is that it sucks up a lot of one’s time and energy.\u00a0 Fairly early on I became Plurk-obsessed, spending all night typing messages to people (you know who you are!).\u00a0 After a while I got over it and scaled back to a manageable level.\u00a0 One of the key features of Plurk is the ability to turn on and off one’s subscription to the posts of one’s “friends”, without dropping them as friends, and without them being informed.\u00a0 There are lots of ways of managing one’s reading load on Plurk, but mine is to reduce my friend list as much as possible and then to switch on (“follow<\/em>“) only those friends whose Plurks I genuinely want to read.\u00a0 In this way I can pay full attention to those people.\u00a0 If I tire of reading someone’s Plurks, I switch them off for a while and try again in a few weeks.\u00a0 If they stay off for ages, I eventually drop them as a friend.\u00a0 Usually, they haven’t been commenting on my Plurks, so the uninterest is mutual!<\/p>\n

In these ways, I select and get to know a group of people of whom I eventually become quite fond.\u00a0 Some of them, I get awfully fond of.\u00a0 To be fair to me, I haven’t fallen hopelessly\u00a0 <\/em>in love with anyone on Plurk (you know who you nearly were!), but that’s only because I’m older and a little more balanced than perhaps I once was.<\/p>\n

Then comes the sad part: sometimes people leave Plurk.\u00a0 As I mentioned before, it can be a terror in stealing one’s free time, or one’s otherwise committed time, or one’s creative time.\u00a0 (I have worried about this myself a bit, because my creative activities have certainly suffered.\u00a0 But my social life has certainly benefited.)\u00a0 So they leave, and leaving is usually a struggle, because those left behind cling on (“We’ll eat you up – we love you so”, said the Wild Things).\u00a0 The manner of leaving therefore becomes sudden and shocking – a clean break is the only way to do it.\u00a0 Then comes the grieving.\u00a0 I’m doing some of that today as you might have guessed.<\/p>\n

As a one-horse social networker so to speak, I lack the confidence in cyberspace that some of my friends have – “I’ll see you elsewhere on the Internet”, some of them say.\u00a0 But I think, “But what if I don’t?”\u00a0 So I need to grow up and remember that real contacts made will last beyond Plurk.\u00a0 I still remember the brother of one of my remaining Plurk friends, who left last Summer.\u00a0 I was so upset that I tracked him down and met up with him in the pub.\u00a0 Must do that again actually.\u00a0 I almost managed to meet another plurker at Leeds station a few weeks ago, and have every hope of meeting a Canadian plurkfriend in Vancouver next week.\u00a0 Physical hugs are more satisfying than virtual ones, but the sad thing is, one gets them so much less frequently.<\/p>\n

Of course, one makes contacts and loses them again in person as well as on the Internet.\u00a0 One big difference though is the turnover rate.\u00a0 I’ve made more deep contacts online since June last year than I have in person in the last 10 years.\u00a0 (I’ve likened it to a second teenagerhood.)\u00a0 With those who have left Plurk, I know that I won’t have the daily contact in the future that I have enjoyed in the last months.\u00a0 There’s no doubt that I will be grieving.<\/p>\n

Will I “learn” from these natural, blameless losses not to get into such deep emotional commitments?\u00a0 Perhaps getting into deep relationships on Plurk has been part of the recovery from my mid-life crisis, exploring the possibility of making commitments again, having lost the ability to do that completely a few years back.\u00a0 Part of me really hopes I don’t “learn” not to do that – the part of me that has always been an over-committer; someone who is willing to throw themselves into an activity or commitment without reserve, without keeping something back for a rainy day.\u00a0 I love that attitude, because it represents the living of life to the full, the plunging deeply into incarnation and getting the most out of one’s experience of life.\u00a0 If I have re-learnt part of that through Plurk, then it’s been an experience well met, well sent, well planned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have been enjoying Plurk since June 2008 and have found people there of whom I have become very fond.\u00a0 They are individuals, but they’re also a group.\u00a0 I have received and given an awful lot of emotional support there which has been helpful in many ways: helpful in avoiding depression and defusing anxiety; helpful […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-social-networking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lemongrass.org.uk\/lemongrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lemongrass.org.uk\/lemongrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lemongrass.org.uk\/lemongrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lemongrass.org.uk\/lemongrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lemongrass.org.uk\/lemongrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lemongrass.org.uk\/lemongrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lemongrass.org.uk\/lemongrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions\/68"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lemongrass.org.uk\/lemongrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lemongrass.org.uk\/lemongrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lemongrass.org.uk\/lemongrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}