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

I didn't mean to take so long figuring this all out!

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

There are 150 personal journals on my friendslist. To get that number, I have discounted all duplicate journals, all roleplaying journals or journals that only contain fiction, all journals that lack any personal information (e.g. halig_gewrit) and all journals belonging to me.

69 (46%) journals belong to people I’ve never met long enough to have conversations with.

34 (23%) belong to friends I first met in real life.

40 (27%) belong to milliways_bar players who I grew to know on the Internet and met in person at game conventions.

The remaining 7 (5%) are non-Milliways friends I met first on the Internet; 5 of those are scholars in my field who I met at medievalist meet-ups or formal academic conventions.