blogmarch

I am definitely a linker/consumer when it comes to virtual communities.  If forced, I have been known to delve into the commentor/lurker mode (usually for class wikis or blogs like this one).   I don’t know if it’s that I don’t have the time, which, as a stay-at-home-mom with toddlers, I don’t, or if I’m just not  interested in moving to the leader/contributor/commentator level.   I link and consume a lot.  I selfishly eat up what other people have taken the time and energy to create.  I am an avid fan of Wikipedia, I get recipes from good food blogs, I look at reviews and ratings on Netflix and Amazon, I learn how to do all kinds of useful and useless stuff on WikiHow, I look up obscure TV show clips from my youth on YouTube, I listen to other people’s music streams on Jango.  I just don’t ever contribute.

I never thought about why I do a lot of online taking but no giving until this assignment.  I am busy, but I am also very committed to the idea of community.  I already have a really big, close community  of people I talk to and see on a daily basis.   I have time for that.  I just don’t have time for more.  I’m full up when it comes to personal connections.  Mostly what I get from virtual communities and social networks is what I have always gotten from the internet:  information.  I am not looking to connect on any sort of friendly or intimate level.  I guess what I enjoy about sites like Wikipedia and cooking blogs and You Tube is getting bits of information from people who have more time, passion and energy to put into a subject that I might have a passing, but not pressing interest in.

As for the social side of virtual communities, I will admit that my qualms about joining Facebook or MySpace come from a mixture of no time, lack of interest, and a little bit of mistrust.   I wonder what kinds of relationships people can have based upon each participant composing a personality, editing out the bad parts, embellishing the good, making stuff up.    I know that we always do these things in relationships, but when you have a face-to-face interaction, it is harder to hide, edit or embellish.  Other people can read your body language, catch a weird tone in your voice.  They can talk back, in the moment, without forethought.  The written, edited, self-composed me is much more interesting than the the one you would find by talking to me face-to-face.  Bolder, wittier, sexier.  I wonder what it would be like to have relationships where that is the only me that people know.  It might be fun, but is it real?

A book I am reading, Against the Machine:  Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, by Lee Siegal, addresses how online relationships are changing the way we think about  the world.  Siegal asks: ”What kind of idea do we have of the world when, day after day, we sit in front of our screens and enter further and further into the illusion that we ourselves are actually creating our own external reality out of our own internal desires?”  Siegal explores the affects of virtual communities on our relationships to others and the world around us, claiming that we become impatient with people and situations that don’t “gratify our impulses” or “satisfy our pictures of reality.”  I am fascinated by Siegal’s take, as he eloquently puts into words some of the vague discomfort I have had about virtual relationships.  I have talked about the rudeness factor that I find in this world of continuous computing, and I think that is why Siegal’s book resonates with me.  I haven’t put it into the right words yet, but when I am talking to someone and they answer a phone call, or text somebody, or check something while they are talking to me, it gives me this feeling of not being important enough to fit into their world, like I don’t “satisfy their picture of reality.”