LiveJournal (LJ) is a mixed bag of mixed genres sharing one (sometimes creatively created) workspace. The user can spend an unlimited amount of their time discussing politics, abortion, gay rights, sports, religion, the latest fandom kernuffle, and harassing non-Firefly folk to go and see Serenity (because Joss Whedon needs your money love). But when you first come upon LJ, you don't really get a hold of any of the above, instead, you meet and greet a homepage with Frank the Goat on it and maybeperhaps a feature that tells you the improvements done to the site in the last previous month.

But what you don't see is the vast (very, very vast) topics and discussions being brought up on a daily basis that fits in the many different genres and discourse displayed in Kress's Multimodality, Multimedia, and Genre article.

LJ falls into the wonderous category of the blog. With a blog, a user can express their various and complicated emotions within an entry and let hundreds of other complicated emotional individuals see (that is if it isn't friends or private locked) their words. The user has free range of dissucussing whatever topics they choose to discuss because, hey, half of them paid for the webspace and they have that right. But the individual that views their emotional rant about, lets say - abortion and why it should be illegal - has that right to argue their position for pro-choice.

The social relations on LJ is complicated itself. Unless the particular entry itself is 'private', anyone can read what you're writing. And since LJ is basically anonymous, there are users who feel as if they have free will to say whatever they have to say. I myself have a LJ and I feel as though my LJ self is much freer than who I am in reality. Sure, I'm sharing myself with the 60 people on my friendslist and others who wander innocently onto my ramblings, but I feel as though I'm talking to and for myself. It's a small little place where I can express my opinions openly and not be all that nervous about sharing them.

You see, in the LJ world, even if you manage to anger someone and the both of you have a falling out, you can easily cut them out from your LJ life and never see them again. In the amusing world of reality, you'll just constantly bump into them over and over again.

The social relation could at times be at ease, but at other times, tense. But for the most part, the world of LJ is a place where new ideas, worlds and genres can open up and thoughts are here anew.