Blogging, Community and Influence: the significance of LiveJournal in the 2000s and beyond
“LiveJournal? More like DEAD Journal.”
This was a joke I shared one time when reminiscing about my first experience of using LiveJournal in the early 2000s to form online connections, write my teenage feelings out, and witnessed — in hindsight — the beginnings of niche subcultures expanding into mainstream influencer status.
It’s easy to forget how LiveJournal set the footprint when it comes to social media as we know it today, considering how quickly technology shifted gears in three decades and how often you see or hear people make the same joke as I did regarding LiveJournal. In 2020, we have a tech-savvy Gen Z demographic who never used LiveJournal and weren’t alive by the time it launched in March 1999.
LiveJournal catapulted the concept of blogging, where users would essentially write in a virtual journal or diary and share it among the public or their online friends based on your LiveJournal’s privacy settings. Through blogging on LiveJournal, users were able to interact with each other in the comments section and create unofficial online magazines such as the popular “Oh No They Didn’t” account that sparked the online gossip tabloid market in the 2000s. Nowadays, blogging is a business dominated by other platforms such as WordPress, which launched in May 2003 — four years after LiveJournal.
Another popular feature within LiveJournal is the “Communities” section, where you can join and meet online users who are into the same interests as you. According to TechCrunch, LiveJournal “became home to things like fan fiction, support groups, creative communities” and basically performed as “a precursor to Tumblr, but with a more advanced, albeit complex, set of administrative features.” The communities on LiveJournal included fandoms from television shows such as “Buffy: The Vampire Slayer,” 2000s pop music fans, and alternative fashion and lifestyle groups.
As with any social media platform, there are users who gain a following — and LiveJournal was no exception. Internet personalities during LiveJournal’s peak from 2003–2007 had all of the trademarks of an “influencer,” even though the definition we associate with the word is synonymous with the mid-2010s era. Two examples that come to mind are George R.R. Martin, bestselling author of “A Song of Ice and Fire” fantasy novel series that became the HBO hit “Game of Thrones,” and Lime Crime cosmetics founder Doe Deere. Even though Martin and Deere were part of different subcultures, both shared a similar path in using LiveJournal to post updates within their respective subcultures and later branched out into the mainstream lens with their personality and products.
The impact LiveJournal left within the online landscape is still visible in 2020 with businesses and people actively using social media to post about their feelings while in quarantine, joining online groups and establishing a brand using tags — just not on LiveJournal.
