Last night, hermits and IM

[danaeris]

Yesterday was an evening of unexpectedness.

I was about to leave to catch a shuttle, and I was offered a ride. Got home more than 1 hour earlier than if I had taken shuttle-->caltrain.

Watched Ghost World. Good, but fucked up, movie.
Went to pizza. Resisted the urge to turn into a bitch like the kid in Ghost World. There was this guy staring at a list of phone numbers. I glanced at him, and resisted the urge to say, "If you stare at it long enough, maybe you'll memorize the numbers!"

The world does not need another bitchy snob.

We went back to unseelie's place and started writing up a guest list for the party... The plan was to write up the guest list, then hop in the car, stop off at my place and grab some stuff, back to his place, shower, and get to bed early so that I could get enough sleep, and the recovering invalid could get extra sleep.

Instead, we spent the next 3-4 hours staring into each other's souls, examining each others minds, coming closer to each other. Cuddling and touching and loving. It was necessary and good for both of us. Therapeutic.

So why do I feel this way today? I was mean to LawBard, who for some unseen reason likes me enough to seek me out on IM *every day*. I want to be left alone today----I want to be a hermit jealous of her privacy.
I'm not sure though that this is a bad mood. I suspect it to be an inflexible mood---I want to be left alone, I want to be private and quiet, except for a few people. Anyone who tries to impose upon my space will be bitched out promptly. But that doesn't make it a BAD mood. Just an unusual one that may be confusing to my friends.

Unseelie said that being on IM is an invitation for chat. I don't think that's true. I use IM so that *I* can talk to the people *I* want to, or be available for logistical discussions when I'm needed. I've NEVER liked idle chat. I either want to be having an interesting intellectual conversation, discussing logistics, or not talking at all. Well, that's not true. There are some few people with whom I find idle chat worthwhile. Almost always, unseelie and rigel. A bunch of other people occasionally.
I guess I should clarify what I mean. If you have something specific to talk about, "I just got laid off" or "I'm worried about this friend of mine" or "I'm thinking of having a party this Saturday" for instance, I don't mind at all. I welcome such conversation. It is real and valuable. Random banter is not, but can intersperse such a conversation when necessary.

I guess I've never used IRC and I'm fairly new to IM. I used some chat mediums when I was in high school, but it was always to rendezvous with a specific person. I model all my live chat experiences off of MIT zephyr, and people treat zephyr very differently than chat or IM. Or at least, I feel they do

Comments

[zunger.livejournal.com]

That's why I tend to stay in "invisible" mode on IM; otherwise I tend to get ten parallel talk requests. Although in my experience, zephyr and even talk(1) were just as bad; not setting mesg n caused just as many people to show up, including the occasional inexplicable chat requests from Thailand.

[laura47.livejournal.com]

i agree with unseelie on this one. IM is *not* zephyr. for many many people, being on IM means
"hi! talk to me!" unless your away message says something else.

my friends are used to me not putting up an idle message and leaving IM going while i am in another state followed by brief spurts of me talking to everyone, but i am an exception and it took 2 years for this to become 'accepted', if still bitched about a bit.


this might seem silly, but since it is trivial to get a new IM name, i know many people who have a second IM name that they only give to close friends for times when they do not want to talk to the whole world.

[danaeris.livejournal.com]

Then your experience is not relevant to MIT zephyr, which did not have random people sending messages at all.

[danaeris.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know IM is not zephyr. I'm bitching because I don't LIKE the conventions of IM, not because I don't understand that those ARE the conventions of IM. OK, maybe I phrased it wrong for that. *sigh* I don't understand normal people though. MIT has certain social conventions about email lists and online etiquette which the real world just does not follow. They are somewhat strict, but they make life so much more pleasant! I just wish there were something like zephyr for everyone to use, with the social conventions intact. I also wish that the rest of the world followed our email list social mores. Oh well.

Getting another IM handle isn't a bad idea. hm. Thanks for the tip

[laura47.livejournal.com]

you probably won't find our social conventions about email anywhere else, because, well, mit's unique. you've got some peopel hanging around who have been on the internet longer than the rest of us have known about it, mailing lists that are really really old, people who devote their entire lives to computers and CARE ALOT about tiny tiny issues. who care to a perhaps unhealthy, or eve "jhawkian" degree. :-) and that varies at mit. like when aletta was complaining about a frosh sending email to the wrong esg list, and all the non-senior house ec people wanted to be so much nicer to the frosh than aletta, and aletta was like "but that would be nice if it th\is happened on senior-house...."

wow i'm talking a lot today.

[danaeris.livejournal.com]

True true. But wouldn't it be cool if the rest of the world followed our email etiquette etc. rules?

I know it'll never happen, but we can dream...

[jadasc.livejournal.com]

MIT has certain social conventions about email lists and online etiquette which the real world just does not follow. They are somewhat strict, but they make life so much more pleasant!

Okay. As one of those random non-MIT people you know, what *are* the social conventions of Zephyr?l

[danaeris.livejournal.com]

ooo. that's a tough one.

For starters, when people are doing zephyr, they are usually doing other things. There is no assumption that if they are online, they are there to chat. Being logged into zephyr is an offshoot of being logged into your MIT account, for most people.

Having said that, there is a much lower rate of messages coming in, and usually it is not considered strange if you take a good long time in between responses.

Second of all, you usually don't send a private zephyr to someone unless you have something in particular to say to them, a message with actual CONTENT. This rule is most often broken with SOs, new friends, and people you are flirting with. Or when the people involved have acknowledged a state of extreme boredome and have explicitly stated a desire to be distracted/kill time.

Zephyr is useful because it can be used to contact many people simultaneously and instantaneously. But its primary purpose, at least in private messages, is to be USEFUL.

Then there's zephyr classes. Zephyr classes are somewhat like chat rooms, except people are logged in all day from work or wherever. This means that high volume is fairly discouraged, and slow response time is common. On zephyr classes and zephyr, you generally know the people involved, or someone you know knows them. You have common context in meat space.
Discussions tend to be personal but public, or about issues in people's lives that are meta and of interest to all (like the logistics of poly), or about weird things that happened that day, or planning social events.

Hm. I'm sure any two zephyr users will disagree with what I've said here, but in spite of that, I find that zephyr is a happy, fun place to be online, and IM to be one where people have strange or unusual expectations (in my warped mind, strange and unusual)

[trowa-barton.livejournal.com]

Resisted the urge to turn into a bitch like the kid in Ghost World.
Which one?

[zunger.livejournal.com]

They used to, before the flag day when AOL connected its servers to the Net... :)

Although my experience with zephyr and talk (the similarly-functioning tool that zephyr supplanted) was that, even in the best of days, one tended to get an awful lot of messages there anyway just from people whom one knew. Half the time it would be relevant, but even so communication traffic was just awful; it was enough to remind you just how wonderful asynchronous communication like e-mail can be.

Perhaps what we need nowadays is just a bigger LART. Say, one built into computers that can administer a remotely-controllable electric shock, variable between "gentle reminder" and "saute." *g*

"That's right, we have a new mailreader, called rm for "Read Mail." The command is 'rm -rf ~'."

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

For starters, when people are doing zephyr, they are usually doing other things. There is no assumption that if they are online, they are there to chat.

well I use IM in precisely the same way - it auto-logs-in when I connect to the net from my home computer and I leave it running in case I have something to say to someone. Pretty much everyone I talk to regularly on it understands that I am always multitasking. the few people who say "hello?" if I don't respond for a bit get a response that I was doing something else and that I am almost always multitasking when I am online. Eventually they seem to get the idea. I have no profile set up so randoms from thailand or wherever don't find me.

In the particular case of lawbard, he was never someone who had issues with me waiting a long time between responses. but then I'm also not someone who has a problem with idle chit-chat - I just don't put much energy into it, but I don't really MIND it as such. and maybe it falls under your 'flirting' category anyway :) Though I think even on zephyr I will send *scritch* zephyrs to friends of mine who I am not flirting with, just to say "hi, I'm thinking of you and feeling affectionate".

hmm. yeah. I guess I just don't see as much of a difference between zephyr and IM. Though I DO wish for a zephyr-class-equivalent outside of MIT oftentimes.