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Cold Kisses
Feb. 13th, 2009 09:43 amOne of the oddest and (to me) most painful things about the internet post the 1999-2000 type era is that there are all these footprints spread across it of the people that you used to know.
And don't know anymore.
If you happen to get hit by a wave of nostalgia you can spend an hour or more tracking little bits of them through Google - variants of names, name combinations - and see these tiny pieces of the life they had at some point in the past after they stopped speaking to you.
Really I do try not to do it as I think it's rather like stalking. The internet is a public forum where we all try to maintain the illusion of privacy, but the illusion gets thinner and thinner. There are only a handful of people from the before-I-dropped-out-of-college era that I both a) miss, and b) know their real names, and none of them have left traces online thick enough to contact them with. One thing I do try to do out of respect is to never ever use their full real names online myself - because once I've done that I'm another of those footprints they don't want, aren't I?
I wonder if that isn't the real appeal of sites like Facebook, LinkedIn etc. Emotionally, there's the possibility of reconnecting, ever so lightly, with someone who you had broken ties with before. It's less intimate than a personal email exchange. I know there are people who have tried to restart an email conversation with me that I have shut down (not just not replied, but replied saying: thanks, but we have nothing to talk about, so bye now), where I might have been willing to friend them in a social network. And months or years of sort of vaguely watching each other's life updates scroll by might have convinced us that being friends was a good idea after all.
There's a Richard Thompson song called Cold Kisses where he talks about reading his lover's letters while she's out at the store. Looking at her old photos and mementos. This internet thing isn't quite like that. It's not old lovers I miss or am curious about. It's the old friends. It's very odd. I wonder if there are already songs about that and I just haven't heard them.
And don't know anymore.
If you happen to get hit by a wave of nostalgia you can spend an hour or more tracking little bits of them through Google - variants of names, name combinations - and see these tiny pieces of the life they had at some point in the past after they stopped speaking to you.
Really I do try not to do it as I think it's rather like stalking. The internet is a public forum where we all try to maintain the illusion of privacy, but the illusion gets thinner and thinner. There are only a handful of people from the before-I-dropped-out-of-college era that I both a) miss, and b) know their real names, and none of them have left traces online thick enough to contact them with. One thing I do try to do out of respect is to never ever use their full real names online myself - because once I've done that I'm another of those footprints they don't want, aren't I?
I wonder if that isn't the real appeal of sites like Facebook, LinkedIn etc. Emotionally, there's the possibility of reconnecting, ever so lightly, with someone who you had broken ties with before. It's less intimate than a personal email exchange. I know there are people who have tried to restart an email conversation with me that I have shut down (not just not replied, but replied saying: thanks, but we have nothing to talk about, so bye now), where I might have been willing to friend them in a social network. And months or years of sort of vaguely watching each other's life updates scroll by might have convinced us that being friends was a good idea after all.
There's a Richard Thompson song called Cold Kisses where he talks about reading his lover's letters while she's out at the store. Looking at her old photos and mementos. This internet thing isn't quite like that. It's not old lovers I miss or am curious about. It's the old friends. It's very odd. I wonder if there are already songs about that and I just haven't heard them.
