Quick show of hands

[lar_laughs]

Is there anyone on my FList that isn't on DreamWidth now and doesn't plan on moving over?

Does anyone need an invite because I think I might have one. Will have to check for sure.

If you aren't moving to DW, are you going somewhere else?

Comments

[ghoulfang.livejournal.com]

Why moving at all? o.O Well, I'm not going anywhere.

[lar_laughs.livejournal.com]

I'm not leaving. Just taking the temperature of my Friends List. Many of them are angry about the new changes that are coming. I'm not a huge fan of the drama that each of the changes brings.

[ghoulfang.livejournal.com]

Glad to hear, you don't leave :) A lot of people on my friendlist are going. I, for one, am waiting until the changes actually take place and they really suck as much, as everyone anticipates. I mean c'mon... Who knows how it will turn out in the end? And everyone is screaming about the fact that lj now sits completely in russia... Am I the only one who finds this a tad bit racist? o.O Well I guess all the drama fits very well in this ugly pink eyecancer, which is dreamwidth -.-

[lar_laughs.livejournal.com]

It's not so much racist as... ideologically different. The LJ outages from a year ago (two years ago?) that were caused by the Russian government closing down social media came as a huge eye opener to Westerners. We aren't used to the government shutting down social media. It's almost as if we feel it is a RIGHT to say what we want to say on the internet. No, it should be stronger. Not ALMOST. We DO feel it's a right to say what we want.

To have a government, any government, tell us we can't use the internet for what we want made a lot of people angry. It could have been any country that Westerners got angry with. This just happened to be a Russian company.

I read a Wikipedia article that really got me thinking about this. It was talking about how one of the heads of the company who owns LJ was saying that he couldn't believe that people were trying to tell him how to run his company and how he wasn't going to give in to them. Westerners (I keep using that term because I don't want to use WE (as in LJ users) in this situation even though it's not only Westerners who are having problems) are used to being able to have their voices heard. If we don't like something, we say something. sometimes we're heard and changes are made. sometimes they aren't. but we felt that our voice was heard. that is very important in our culture.

I realize now that Westerners will have to get used to this sort of thing as we become more International. We had a United States President back in the 1800s who has famously been quoted as saying, "Speak softly and carry a big stick." Westerners have gotten away from that and started to Speak Loudly and Wave Our Fists In the Air. Maybe it's time to learn to once again speak softly but get things done in other ways. We can't demand things without being able to back them up in action.

Does that make any sense?

Really, this is my first foray in really thinking about this. I was raised to think of my "world" as being as far as my eye could see and then, later, as far as my car could take me. To think globally is not something I was raised to do. I don't really know another language (but that is mostly my fault and not the school system) and I didn't have international friends until a few years ago. I've always thought that everyone else is just like me when that is vastly untrue. I am a product of my culture. When the whole world starts being like Idaho (farmers and cattle ranchers with vast tracts of land between any sort of civilization with an ideology that heads toward "what can I shoot with rifle and eat with ketchup" and nowhere near "I want to listen to what you say and try to form an opinion that is based on what we all need and not just on what I think") then I'm set! Right now, I have to wrap my head around these new concepts and really think about it to make it make any sort of sense so the above paragraphs are all about me trying to reason this out.