Grey's Journal:
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My mother is a bit paranoid about the internet. Ever since I started this website, she has worried about me making so much information about myself available to anyone in cyberspace. Part of her worry is derived from television. She manages to catch all sorts of news programs about identity thieves and scams and feels the need to pass on prevention tips to me. I do my best to be patient and understanding, but sometimes, I just can't stand it -- I remember when I first put my resume online months ago my mother warned me: ``If someone offers you a job, but they say they need money first for processing forms, it's a scam.'' I thanked her for the advice, but couldn't stop myself from rolling my eyes. She continued. ``I know you think you are so smart and wouldn't fall for this, but I saw this man on Oprah who fell for a scam like that and,'' here my mother paused for effect, ``...he had a PhD!'' My mother thinks of the internet as a place filled with people who are out to get you. If she never used the internet, I could understand this viewpoint. That which is foreign breeds fear. But, she uses the internet almost as much as I do -- I dare say her connectivity surpasses mine on some days. She leaves messages on bulletin boards discussing her favorite reality TV shows, researches her current interests, and emails her friends all the time. She also did her small part to help inflate and burst the .com bubble by trading stocks online with breathtaking speed and in equally breathtaking numbers at the close of the millennium. But, despite her familiarity with the online world, she still imagines grimy criminals and greasy perverts crawling her son's journal all day long. Though I scoff at her exaggerated image of the dangers of the 'net, no child escapes the effect of their parents unscathed. I have inherited more of that internet paranoia than I would have liked. While absolutely nothing quite makes my day like receiving an email from someone who reads and enjoys my journal, I can't help but wonder sometimes: who are these people? I received an email the other day from a German man living in London who liked my journal and noticed my Paypal donation button on the bottom. Instead of wiring me money electronically, he decided to offer to buy me dinner in real life. This, he wrote in his email, was similar to what he did to help the homeless. Instead of just giving homeless people money, he asked them what they needed, and as long as it wasn't something illegal, he did his best to help them out. While I understood his intentions, I frowned slightly upon reading the comparison to the homeless. It played right into something my mother has said repeatedly about my Paypal button: ``I can't believe it, my son, with a degree in physics, is panhandling on the internet.'' I read over the German's email a few times. Though I was glad to find another fan of my journal, I wasn't entirely comfortable with a man asking to buy me dinner. I worried I'd find myself at some restaurant, no doubt with mood lighting and long candles, with some creepy guy recounting how he printed out my webpage and read it every night as he fell asleep so as to dream of me. Then, as though entirely unrelated, he would casually bring up the recent case in Germany of a cannibal who had found over the internet a man willing to be eaten. This, of course, would be told as my new German friend fondly admired his steak knife and started sizing up my various body parts. I wrote back expressing my concerns, though not quite in such an explicit manner. Shortly afterward, almost too shortly, my iBook beeped to let me know there was a reply. He apologized for not realizing that in the States buying someone dinner had a different connotation than he had intended. It was a cultural faux pas. I'm sympathetic toward unintended cultural misunderstandings. Living as I do with a Bulgarian, I face such misunderstandings on nearly a daily basis. Zornitsa will knock on my door asking if I want some tea or wine while she gets some for herself. I consent, and when I arrive in the kitchen after finishing whatever I was doing, I find she has prepared a small feast. ``What's all this?'' I ask, startled. ``You cannot just have wine,'' she states. (I must interject here that she really doesn't say things the way normal people do. All her sentences are statements, even her questions. She states her thoughts as though there was no possible way to argue with them. And with her, there usually isn't.) ``You need meat with wine.'' Here she gestures to the roast boar taking up most of the kitchen. ``With meat you need salad. With salad bread.'' This explains the startling number of other plates taking up the rest of the dining area. ``But I just had dinner,'' I protest. ``Your cereal is not dinner,'' she states. ``Now eat.'' While my Bulgarian adventures prepared me to forgive my German fan of his cultural misunderstanding, I was still a bit wary. You see, smileys filled his emails. I never trust too many smileys. Almost every line he wrote ended with either a :) or, particularly troubling, a ;). This is a problem with representing one's self on the internet. Everyone has had the experience of making a sarcastic remark or a joke over the 'net, only to have the person on the other end assume it to be serious. Part of the problem is that e-communications tend to be short -- a line or two on average, a paragraph or two at the most verbose -- so there is little context from which to infer tone and gain subtler insights into the mind of the writer. Thus, emoticons (smileys, to the less nerdy) were invented. And emoticons are good, they serve their purpose. A well placed :) or :( can save the day. But when the number of smileys starts rivaling the number of words, I grow uneasy at the sight of the grinning, winking faces. It's like having a conversation with someone who always smiles. Unnerving, but not something you can really complain about. ``Pardon me, but would you mind smiling less,'' is not a sentence that will go over well, no matter how politely asked. When I mentioned to my German fan that I wasn't really comfortable with a one-on-one dinner, he suggested I come to a London gathering he was organizing on Orkut. Interlude: A Brief History of Social Networking Software Orkut is the latest entry from google in an area of the internet known as social networking services. It started with the idea of six-degrees of separation: that everyone is connected to everyone else by a link of at most six friends. Social networking is a way to visualize and find those connections. You log into the webpage, enter in all your friends, and the system automatically invites them to join as well. It feels like a pyramid scheme or naming names at a McCarthy trial, but you get over that quickly. Once you have turned in your friends, and they have turned in their friends and so on, you can see all sorts of interesting ways that you are connected to other people. Different social networking websites use this information to achieve different goals. Friendster is a dating service, Linkedin is a business network, Orkut is a virtual community, and Tribe is just horrible for everything. I've been playing around with Orkut for the last month or so when I should have been doing more important things like earning a living and figuring out my life. It's surprisingly addictive. It turned out that my German fan was on Orkut as well (which was presumably how he found my journal in the first place) and was organizing a get-together for the Orkut London Community at a series of cafes recommended by TimeOut for having particularly good hot chocolates. I didn't have any good reason to refuse, and besides, my social skills were getting a bit rusty, so I agreed to join the meeting. So ultimately, it seemed I had unintentionally talked my way out of meeting one stranger from the internet into meeting ten. * * *
Well, I was certainly glad I went. Even though I heard the worried voice of my mother in my ear all the way to the meeting place, her voice went away almost as soon as I arrived. I met the German organizer in the Churreria Espanola cafe along with the rest of the group. When I arrived, the place was quite busy, and the waitress had difficulty acquiring a chair and making room at the table for me at first, which was quite good from my perspective, as it let me get a look at these people before I made the commitment to sit down. As there were no steak knives clearly visible, and these looked like normal people, I joined the table. In addition to the German organizer, who was neither a cannibal nor crazy, there was a Kiwi (the New Zealanders have the best national nickname) and his girlfriend; an Australian couple (the Australians are all over London for some reason); a girl with an unplaceable-but-clearly-American accent (it turned out she had lived all over Europe but never in America); and best of all, an honest-to-God Londoner. This woman had been born in London and lived here her whole life. I was very glad to meet her as I was beginning to think that London was a city comprised solely of foreigners. All in all it was a good day. Sure there were the awkward moments when all conversation stopped and we found ourselves returning for the tenth time to the only common purpose we had (`Boy, this hot chocolate sure is good!') but vastly more than not the conversation was affable, orbiting around the topics that foreigners seem to like the best, mainly accents and cultural differences. At one point, the Australian woman turned to me and asked: ``I have to know if a rumor I've heard about America is true.'' Dramatic pause. ``Is cheese in America really bright orange and comes in a spray can?'' I assured her that this was indeed true, though it depended somewhat on how one defined cheese. If you didn't require a cow as the starting point in the creation process, then yes, the stuff that came out of the can was cheese. It's always fun to discover that the banalities of your daily life are a source of rumor and speculation half a world away. |
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Copyright © 2004 Wellington Grey  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. |
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