What I do find extremely interesting, is that now that the lines of communication are wide open, and the groups and stigmas associated with childhood and especially high school aren't constraints, the people I grew up with that I communicate with now, are not the ones I really hung out with then. People's interests have matured, and I maintain friendships with several people I don't think I ever spoke with at length in High School. At the same time, several I would have consider the closest of friends, I don't speak with at all, even though they are just as available.

Twitter has become very interesting as it seems friendships are made very fast though such short messages, very little real-time communication, the last conference I went to I ran into a half dozen twitter contacts and we were fast friends as if we had chatted late into the hours about the minute details of our lives. Talk about compression….interesting thoughts, great article.

[...] Hess The Stranger Aversion UX designer Whitney Hess responds to O’Donnell’s post [...]

It’s funny, you referenced Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point in [this] post about strangers; in my paper I am also citing his book, Blink, to describe the process of assessing virtual contacts as potential friends. [...] Blink discusses the “adaptive unconscious,” and how we rely on subtle cues and clues to formulate quick conclusions (“gut reactions”) about things. In my experience, this theory definitely applies to assessing genuineness in virtual folks. One of the points Gladwell makes is that we have been culturally conditioned not to trust this instinct, so we’ve trained ourselves away from it in many ways—society tells us to take our time, find more facts. But I think if one is tuned into it, (in my experience, anyway), it acts as a pretty good barometer for evaluating online personalities.

I have met countless “virtual people” face to face, and I have rarely encountered gross misrepresentation. I think that’s because I shy away from people I perceive as not being genuine, but it is probably also due to the fact that people who misrepresent themselves know it and usually aren’t interested in meeting in person. But I’m also an optimist, so while I know that there are definitely a few wing-nuts out there who enjoy pretending to be someone they’re not, I believe the majority of people are probably, like you and me, just interested in engaging with others in a fun, social and (sometimes) productive way. The problem is that the creeps get all the media attention—which I discuss in my section on stereotypes and stigma regarding online encounters.

Additionally, I’d like to add that yes, while more and more people who we already know are now (finally!) online—making ‘friendship/contact management’ communities like Facebook and LinkedIn relevant and worthwhile—the influx of public internet use in recent years also means that there are that many more people available online who we don’t yet know. Which means that there are that many more possibilities for connecting with new people. Services like Twitter give me faith that dating and romance-focused sites and communities aren’t the last outposts for meeting new people. The safety net of friend references and referrals afforded by sites like Facebook is comforting, yes, but the prospect of chance interactions and new relationships with those previously unknown to us is still exciting, and potentially rewarding.

I, like you, grew up as an anonymous online adolescent.. trolling the internet for interaction with the unknown; often having a blast creating entire fictional characters to personify and cultivate in chat rooms.

In the past year.. strangers I met in my late teens under fake ‘handles’ have become facebook friends.. we have emerged, gradually, from the darkness and shadows of the anonymous internet to stand confident in new authentic, transparent, trusting embodiments of our more-and-more-whole real-world avatars.

Through the whole process though.. I know that I cultivated a vocabulary of expressing and discovering my true internal self with strangers, I gained confidence in that vocabulary, so that I could bring it back to my real-world relationships (my known contacts).

I’m running on.

The online world gives us access to this enormous knowledge base of experience we can tap into, not only for what we do professionally, but for personal issues as well. It’s less effort than getting out of bed, jumping into your car, going over to your friend’s house, and doing whatever that you would be doing.

Maybe, we’re lazy, it’s less effort, or just that these people that we have distant online relationships with fill the need we can’t get from some of our closest personal relationships.

I don’t know if we can do anything to create a safe environment, but we can create safer environments. Having worked in the biometric industry, I’ve learned that nothing is “fool-proof”. There is always an unaccounted variable that can throw everything off, and humans are unpredictable.

For now, my thirst for connection has been quenched.