Cyber-friendships — we all have them, and don’t be deceived by the title. You fuel these relationships subconsciously, without any hesitation or qualms. You don’t even have to be a closet chatroom connoisseur or have any special high-tech gadgets. Well, maybe you do need one, a computer and Internet connection, which pretty much goes hand in hand nowadays, unless you find yourself without electricity or human contact. In that case, I don’t know why you’d be reading this.
We all have these “cyber-friendships” each and every day, enhancing them and affecting them with the simple click of a button and, no, I’m not talking about Friendster here (I know that just crushed half of the demographic, darn).
OK, so what am I talking about? I’m getting there, I promise.
I had this moment of clarity this week, a wonderful revelation, Eureka! moment, whatever you want to call it. I was walking home, when I ran into an old friend and we started catching up.
Now, I hadn’t seen this person since maybe mid-September of last year. No contact, no phone calls, not even the occasional see-but-too-far-to-say-anything type of deal that I know I have every so often.
So, we engage in a “normal” conversation, a “how’s class/work/friends/your aunt/cousin and the whole kit-n-caboodle” conversation. Then I began to catch on to a certain trend in the conversation and got a funny feeling.
Without talking to this person for about three to four months, he seemed to know a surprisingly large amount of information about me and my personal life. I didn’t even really catch on to it until about five minutes later as I was walking back to my apartment.
How did he know all of this information about me? It wasn’t like he had heard it from other people that we both used to hang around with, because it had been equally as long since I’d seen anyone from that crowd either. He kept rattling off more and more things, personalized questions about things that had happened in the recent past, like last week.
It wasn’t adding up. I was a bit perplexed as these questions about my classes and work rolled off his tongue.
Then it hit me (cue the giant light bulb over my head and … go). The reason this information he was citing off as if he were my subconscious sounded oh-so-familiar was that I had seen it before. I knew I had.
The questions about work, knowing who I was hanging out with on certain days and pretty much the bulk of the conversation I had written.
In an away message.
And that was the fuel for this entire “talk.”
Yes, give that one a good chuckle.
He had just recited to me for the past seven minutes (my rough estimate) of our stroll across campus what I had posted as my away messages … for the last three months. (Pause to applaud his extensive memory capacity, over 130 days worth of “at The News,” “working late” or “eating with the crew.”) Impressive, now isn’t it?
What my friend did isn’t so out of the ordinary, though. Actually it has become a pretty common practice.
AOL Instant Messenger allows all of us to keep up to date with those people that we have tried to phase out of existence: ex-boyfriends, old friends, new friends, or the random screenname are still trying to figure out the identity.
You know you do it. Some people allot certain time slots for it, as if, without it, their days are off kilter.
Scroll through that buddy list, be impressed with yourself about the number of “buddies” you have and the catchy names of the categories that you came up with.
We live vicariously through this simple way of communication. Some people choose using IM, over the telephone. I guess picking up a cell phone and talking into it so it dials for you is just way too much work. What was I thinking, who would EVER want to put themselves through that much of a workout just to talk to a friend?
Just be careful that you don’t get completely brainwashed by this device. While IM may be crucial to communicating at a low cost and at the fingertips of people around the world, be cautious not to become one of “them.”
One of those people that doesn’t even know they’ve switched sides, the person that you ask where your other friend is and they say, “eating dinner, call the cell” without any hesitation, then realize they just rattled off an away message. The people that say “btw” rather than “by the way” or “brb” when they have to go out of the office for a second. And what finally defines you as one of “them,” an “AIMer,” as I call them, is beyond rattling off away messages as fact or in place of verbally talking to someone. It’s beyond the excitement in looking for a buddy icon to show off after you’ve been looking for hours online.
The true deciding factor in whether someone is a real “AIMer” through and through deals with, gasp, “smilies.” Use one of those in a sentence and you’ve become the ultimate product of AOL propaganda, *wink.*
-Kaitlin Thaney can be reached at [email protected]
