Comments | julieclipse: They say you always remember your first time ...

julieclipse

They say you always remember your first time ...

Mar 31, 2004 22:58

The conference was great. Rode up with Akaka[01] (Kama and Dancerfish were in Kama's car) and had a good long talk about our early education experiences (lots of homeschooling, lots of science fair), our wonderful times as Gillian's students, a brief and awkward divergence into personal matters, from which we recovered to go back to those earlier ( Read more... )

Comments 4

Hmmm... count_fenring April 1 2004, 01:35:44 UTC

Due to my unflagging interest in web social conventions, I will spring upon your footnote. Note, however, that I have read the rest, and found it interesting and amusing. And the video link is, at this time, not working for me. Which, given that other web-things are currently malfunctioning, could very well be something broken on campusweb, as opposed to on your server. Anyway ( ... )

Re: Hmmm... julieclipse April 1 2004, 07:49:34 UTC

I used the term "pseudonym" because I thought it had the fewest net-specific connotations (I would say that "handle" has the most). The topic you're discussing is very interesting, but what I had in mind was referring to people without known on-line handles, for example, professors. The majority of my Diaryland peergroup give everyone pseudonyms, including ~adults like professors, bosses, and family members. The point seems to be anonymity rather than identity - presumably a gesture towards protecting one's comments from limitless rumor spreading and oneself from defamation lawsuits.

I've noticed much less of this amongst my LiveJournal peergroup.

My samples are confounded, because my DLand contacts are mostly New College and my LJ contacts are mostly NBTSCampers, so the differences may be between the cultures of those two groups rather than the cultures of the two OLJing media.

Re: Hmmm... julieclipse April 1 2004, 08:18:02 UTC

As for your theory, my spin on it would be that the Internet used to be smaller (remember the web in 1995, and how little time it took to get back to a familiar page from a somewhat random one? How you could actually view essentially every page on a given topic? (How horribly ugly everything was?)). If you were on-line, you could consider yourself part of a special group. Something of a computer geek, someone exploring new territory, doing something exciting and new. Learning exotic shell commands and protocol structure. You post something on Usenet, and most of the other people with access stand a chance of seeing it. The people who are interested in things you're interested in will recognize your handle and your signature, and those people will probably be random far away people you've never met before. They're part of your new social group - the group of "people on the Internet ( ... )

Re: Hmmm... julieclipse April 1 2004, 08:20:30 UTC

Oh, one more thing. Try the video link now. My bad. Be warned, it's somewhat large.