Everybody knows the burrowowl lives in a hole. In the ground. Why the hell do you think they call it a burrowowl, anyway?
— The Dead Milkmen, Stuart
I’ve been around on the Internets for a while. I was using this hunk of junk before they were pluralized. Back when we all thought it was a big truck we could just pile things on. Back when NCSA Mosaic was new and mysterious, and tools like Gopher and Archie were the rule of the day. I remember the rise of WWIV bulletin boards here in Sonoma County and thinking that 9600 baud was a bit excessive. And a bowl of soup was a nickle. Anyway.
There are some things I’m just too old and crotchety to quite understand. It’s a pretty long list, so I won’t get into everything. Instead I’d like to just comment openly on web forums and friend lists. I participate in a couple of web forums (fora for you guys that took a semester of Latin) where I have been a reasonably-frequent contributor. Heck, I’ve made nearly 4,000 posts on the Privateer Press site. I was comfortable that in the twenty-two years I’ve participated in bulletin boards and their more recent analogs were open books to me. You acquire an account by whatever means the sysops make available to you, you operate under an alias, you have to live with the fact that the sysops and mods have absolute editorial control should they choose to exercise it, et cetera. I’ve even (reluctantly) become fairly fluent in BBcode.
What I can’t for the life of me understand is why people I don’t know, that I’ve never met, that I don’t actively exchange private messages with, sometimes whose screen names I do not recognize, will add me to their friend lists. When I get a message that says “somedude has successfully added you to their friends list,” my immediate reaction is negative. Who the hell is somedude? Since when did somebody get to unilaterally make friends with me? What kind of horrible standards does this site have for determining a baseline of friendship? Did the word “friend” change on me, did I miss that memo?
When my kid shares a plastic dump truck at the park, he’s made a friend. It’s a shallow ad-hoc friendship that doesn’t even necessitate the exchange of names. Two little kids being nice to each other at the same time are friends. The older you get, the more involved and stringent your requirements for friendship become. You start sorting people out into categories of “classmates” and “teammates” and “acquaintance,” and save the term “friend” to apply only to people towards whom you extend a measure of genuine trust and concern and camaraderie. The natural development of social caution and skepticism contracts your willingness to recognize friendship in strangers.
This doesn’t jive with some anonymous assclown suddenly sticking a label on your web persona. Not even at its loosest, most innocent, pure form of toddler playgroup friendship sees this, where even a hint of reciprocity need not apply.
I have standards. If you only know me as Burrowowl, I am not your friend. If I posted an encouraging comment on your weblog, that is not an exception. I agreed with you at the moment about that very narrow topic of discussion. Reading the “About” page and seeing my full name doesn’t earn you special consideration. To me you are whatever paper-thin mask you hold up in front of your screen as your online persona.
some sites say “so and so is now following you” which is really what it is, right? Stalking? Or another is like “so and so wants to add you as a contact” and allows you to approve or deny it. At least it says “contact” rather than “friend.” Friend assumes so much. I would say that for the most part almost every person on a social networking site which I have “friended” or have been “friended” by is most likely just an acquaintance.
related: I have to figure out a way to run a WWIV board. It probably means buying a PC. or at least finding a PII for free somewhere that can run linux or windows.
Following – what if you could undertake some kind of evasive maneuvers to try to “shake” somebody that’s following you? It would add a certain “cloak and dagger” feel to online forum participation. This may merit further consideration.
Stalking – that’s pretty much what this flavor of “friendship” looks like to me. Stalking strongly implies a level of creepiness, but hey.
Contact – that’s probably what people are really trying for. Except for some basement-dwelling /b/tards for whom “stalking” is actually appropriate.
WWIV – it runs on Linux too, so I assume you could compile it for one of your Mac boxes. Considering that those things used to run great on 286 machines back in the day, anything that could run OS X should be able to handle it without problem.
I just shudder to think about what sort of horrible security issues I might open my home computer up to by allowing telnet to it, even if the telnet session is only to WWIV.
I get your point, but I do feel some attachment to many people/online persona’s I follow. Some people open their lives on their blogs and after some time I start to think about them as more than just writing on a blog. I never met you but if you are ever in KC I’ll buy you a beer. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. Also I added you to my Google reader long time ago, so it’s pretty much the same except you don’t get notified.