Prolegomena to profound post on RL vs LJ rel'ps

[steepholm]

I'll leave the profound post to someone else to write, but in the meantime I've been looking at my friends list, which currently includes 27 different people (not counting myself). And I got to wondering...

How many of my LJ friends have I met in real life?

Answer: 10 (37%). For this purpose, 'met' is a very flexible term, ranging from a single conversation to lifelong partnership, but words must have been exchanged, at least. Thus, I'm not counting lamentables or nineweaving, because although I've been in the same room as them (in my pre-LJ days), I don't think we had a conversation.

(I do enjoy meeting LJ friends in the flesh, by the way - as I and lady_schrapnell did the other day with lilliburlero. And I'm really looking forward to meeting emmaco when she comes to England.)


How many did I first meet through the internet (excluding email)?

Answer: 23 (85%). Almost all of them. The only exceptions I can think of are fjm, gerald, sdn and drasecretcampus.


How many did I get to know through LJ?

Answer: 12 (44%). The other main source is the Diana Wynne Jones mailing list.

I'm a relative LJ newbie, and my friends list isn't that large, but I'd be interested to know if these proportions are typical. (Maybe it's also relevant that 25 (93%) of my friends are female.)

Comments

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

I've done a quick count of the 72 individuals on my list (excluding duplicate accounts and LJ status) and can offer the following figures:

I have met 54 (75%) of my list in real life.

I think I met 8 of these (11%) in real life before being aware of them via email lists or LJ (a couple of the most recent ones I may have seen commenting in other people's journals before I met them, but I wasn't really conscious of them until meeting face to face).

53 (74%) I met through the Blake's Seven fandom, mostly through the email lists at Lysator and Freedom City, though a few I may have first encountered at conventions or through partners I knew on the email lists.

11 (15%) I met through LJ, including a couple I met in a Blake's-Seven-on-LJ context, but I'm assigning them to LJ because I didn't meet them via the lists or conventions.

Oh, and 51 (71%) are female, and I thought that would be higher...

PS

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

The overlap between the 54 I have met in real life and the 53 I met through B7 email lists and conventions is 46; this slightly exaggerates the dominance of B7 relationships in my real life, because one of the reasons why I settled on LJ was that so many friends from the B7 lists had already migrated here (and many of us are not very active in that fandom any more). People I know in other social contexts are far less likely to be on LJ.