The Manichean Paranoia Patch

I haven’t updated this thing in a while. This is for a number of reasons: lack of readers, lack of time on my part, having the campus newspaper A Modest Proposal as another outlet to voice my thoughts. However, I’ve noticed that for some reason my views have started steadily increasing over the past few weeks. Even though I haven’t written any new posts in months, I’m getting about 10 views per day. So if people have decided to take an interest in my thoughts I might as well throw up a post to keep it active.

Let me first say that the “phenomena” I’m about to describe will only make sense to people that actively use some sort of instant messaging program on the Internet. I am mentioning it because I discovered an interesting parallel between the digital social situation and a common in-person social situation.

If you are in a conversation with someone and they tell you they have to leave, you usually expect them to sign-off the program. Signing off makes it impossible to send messages back and forth and is a definitive end to the chat. However, sometimes the other person leaves their instant messaging program on after they tell you they are going to leave. When this happens to me, I often find it awkward. Even though I know they’re either not there or are too distracted to respond, in the back of my mind I always wonder whether they were just tired of talking to me and are still actively at their computer communicating with others.

This is analogous to a situation in which you are talking with a friend on the street (or on campus for those high school/college students) and you say goodbye but then coincidentally end up walking in the same direction. It’s uncomfortable because socially you have already declared an end to your interaction but the physical proximity hasn’t caught up to the social realities. This forces you to either restart the conversation (which is pointless because it will imminently be brought to an end) or deal with a prolonged silence as you walk together.

That’s it. I thought it was an interesting comparison, but certainly not worth writing about anywhere else but a blog.