*sigh*
2 April 2003, 9:45 PM

Geek Austin
2 April 2003, 8:27 PM

Muffin's Kittens
2 April 2003, 8:22 PM

Aren't they cute?

Instant Messaging
2 April 2003, 10:38 AM

Remember the days of "talk" and "phone"? If you do you're probably an Internet Dinosaur like me. These days the same thing is done via client applications on your personal computer, (rather than on a mainframe) and the phenomenon is called "instant messaging".

I do find talk/instant messaging useful on a daily basis (more so than most of my fellow online dinosaur friends it seems) since my sweetie and I can chat with each other during the day, or query, "Wanna go to lunch? meet you in the hallway/parking lot?" or "Did you remember to talk to the bank?" It's a lot less intrusive than the phone. there's a sense of "presence" that's comforting in a way. I'm thinking about getting my mom introduced to the same program I use.

A tiny handful of my co-workers use it as well. It tends to be those who are very active online and most of them do it for non-work reasons. They keep up with friends, family, old business contacts. Still, it's actually come in pretty handy at work a number of times, to quickly and easily pass files a query about a server or technical issue without requiring the person to be tied to the phone.

With that in mind, and since our department is temporarily scattered here and yon across campus (while renovations are done on our usual space), I held a class on instant messaging to introduce people to a possible tool to help communication. It was sparsely attended, but another one may be useful to those who wanted to come but couldn't. It was also a good beta-run for a class that I'll latter have for faculty who want to know better what students are doing.

Now mind you, I use ICQ and have it configured nine-ways-to-Sunday in order to lock it down from unwanted spam and the random user who wants to chat me up. That used to be a real problem for me in the days of "phone" and "talk" on the mainframe. I'd be minding my own business, either doing classwork online or emailing my listservs and I'd get a talk request across my screen. The alerts were always rather intrusive since they would just beep across several lines of your screen in the middle of an email. They'd also be insistant - the only way I could make 'em go away was to allow the talk request and TELL the person to go away.

It was more than annoying. It was disconcerting. Invariably it was some bored Pakistani/Indian/muslim guy in a university computer lab somewhere on the otehr end of the request. He'd likely been searching university domains with the command "finger" to find out who was online. These guys knew (as most western guys didn't) that the name "Fazia" was a female name. And they'd pounce on me every time. (Your average "Joe" and "Bob" didn't ppunce because they all assumed my name was male. It was my friends like "Julia" and "Cindy" who got he Joe/Bob talk requests.)

At the beginning of every semester I'd get at least one a day. Every one of these lonely hearts wanted to be my "friend" and would start the conversation in intimate tones. The pattern continues to this day in email messages - they greet me in intimate tones, ask me for more detailed information about me, and rarely even offer up their own names. I replied at all I was instantly their best friend. Should I DARE to say I wasn't interested in chatting, or that I was BUSY DOING WORK, then *I* was a rude person, a bitch.

When I learned I could turn off "talk" I did. Unfortunately that meant that my friends on campus couldn't use it to invite me out to lunch or meet me on campus. We just had to keep our shell accoutn connections open and keep an eye on the incoming email to PINE in order to get the feel of "instantly" talking.

Needless to say, when instant messaging first arrived, I was not interested. Throw myself to the wolves again? Yeah, right. But I soon found that I could keep them at bay with numerous options to authorize contacts, lock out multi messages and hide my online presence when I was connected. So I returned to the world of instant messaging and it's been a good thing.

Today, however, I got a request from some guy in Karachi and I was reminded of all those old "talk" days. I must have opened a hole in my ICQ settings when I installed a PC version to teach my co-workers. I'm going to have to find it and fix it. The really sad thing is that nearly 13 years later the requests sound EXACTLY the same. There's till the overly enthusiastic greeting that implies I know this person intimately. When PRESSED he finally admits, "you don't know me and I don't know you". Jeff likened it to those spam advertisements that carry a subject line, "re: your account" to lure you into reading the spam. This is about the same thing except that the intention is to lure you into interaction.

I set my ICQ to ignore the user and now I'm checking my settings.

What always struck me about these guys was the sameness of the approach, the reason for it and the expectations. I was a woman online, therefore I was there to be chatted up. They had free time, they were bored and they were looking for friendship/entertainment. None of them would ever accept the reality that women like me (many of my girlfriends noted the same problem) were NOT bored. We were busy. Way too busy. We were the ones who would have to run the errands, do the cooking when we got home, etc. We had very little free time in our lives to spend online chatting.

This reality was an annoyance to these guys. They wanted our time and dammit, they'd have it - no argument from us or else we'd be labeled rude. We were always in the position of havign to defend our time, to weed out an justificaton for ineracting with these guys. It was never offered to us. Still, in the end the technology itself helped us where the guys themselves wouldn't. It allowed us to cut them off and return to what we were doing. But even today it annoys me how little these guys seemed to care that they were being intrusive, demanding a chunk of our precious free time - from a stranger no less - as if it was their right. They'd never offer up details about themselves - of course not, they weren't there to entertain US, we were there to entertain THEM. The lack of any reciprocal exchange of information indicated that quite clearly.

Thirteen years ago, 20 years old and shy as anything, any attention seemed flattering to me. But after a decade of the equivalent of a bar room, "Come here often?" come-on the attention is simply old, annoying and leaves nothing behind but the bad taste of cliches and a jaded perspective.

Rant, rant rant. I'd better go find that IM hole and plug it up.