Online “Friendships” and Identities

While staying in New Haven Friday night, I slept over in the common room of Morse College, which is Mather’s sister house at Yale. I’m not affiliated with Mather House anymore, but my best friend and blockmate Jason is. He was very, very drunk and I put him to bed there. After a semi-sleepless, freezing night sleeping on a bench behind an arcade game, I woke up to a conversation between (who I assume to be) Matherites in the common room. A male voice made mention of “Lena Chen’s STI clinic.” In my groggy state, I figured I could be dreaming, being paranoid, etc. but Jason heard the same comment.

I know people say and think terrible things about me. That’s not okay, but I’ve dealt with that reality and I’ve come to terms with it as much as an oft-criticized person realistically can. Still, it’s instances when I’m witness to said terrible things that I get riled up and am reminded of all the reasons why I’ve done so much running away from Harvard over the past year (transferring to Currier, frequent weekend trips to New York, etc.) I mean, I was sleeping in the common room assigned to people from my former House. How is that supposed to make me feel about Mather kids or my supposed peers or even Harvard? It’s stuff like this that makes me think for every time I bear witness to mudslinging, how much slung mud has gone unseen or unheard of?

I didn’t say anything to the guy or the others in the conversation, because I like to give people (especially my peers) the benefit of the doubt and he’s probably not a bad person because let’s face it, most of us make facetious comments about the shit show that is Britney Spears. Still, I’m not a high-profile celebrity mom gone bonkers and I assume it would’ve been pretty mortifying for him to be confronted by me in front of his friends. Almost as mortifying as say, waking up to someone talking about his supposed STIs. So for future reference, if you’re going to talk shit about me, you should probably make sure I’m not sleeping five feet away from you because guess what? You ruined my day about five seconds after I woke up. If anyone feels like apologizing to me about this, look up my email address.

So, this anecdote was fresh on my mind when I came across MIT senior Ben Pope’s insightful post on his blog about judging people based on their online profiles and identities. (Confession: I found his post because it mentions my blog and I subscribe to Google alerts for “Lena Chen”):

“The temptation, I think, is to form opinions about people from their many posts and profiles. To like or dislike, respect or discount a person based upon the information they have posted is tempting. Everyday we judge each other by our the cover of our facebook. At the same time, though, it is easy to forget that even as the internet provides vehicles for faster and more detailed updates, the time lag is still high and bandwidth low. Profiles and posts often can’t begin to approach telling of the whole story, no matter what we may think.”

I think Ben pretty much hits the nail on the head. We’re all guilty of judging people we see on television or read about in the tabloids, but the Internet makes it possible to celebritize everyone (and no, that’s not a real word). Social networking sites and blogs allow us to familiarize ourselves with people we don’t actually know, and it’s easy to forget that until you interact with someone in person, you can’t really get the full picture. The Internet and my blog let me first become acquainted with plenty of friends, but meeting them added an entirely different dimension to my understanding of who they were beyond the computer screen. I’m sure there are people who feel the same way about me too. Anyone else have stories about interesting online-to-offline relationships?

The subject is a highly relevant one considering my recent obsession with Twitter, the micro-blogging phenomenon that I’ve replaced Facebook status updates with. I’m slightly conflicted about who I should add (or “follow”). Like my blogroll, I initially decided to only stick to people I knew in real life and have gradually included those who write blogs I subscribe to. From what I can tell, it seems like most people follow the people who follow them, but I actually try to read all the tweets and would probably never get work done if I did that. Even if I eventually add my followers, I’m definitely being less indiscriminate than with Facebook, but then again, I don’t have to deal with 1,079 status updates on the latter (yes, that’s my number of current Facebook friends).

Related note, I have over 100 pending friend requests on Facebook, which is slightly ridiculous, and I’m tired of it. I don’t automatically approve Facebook friend requests, but it’s becoming a huge pain to ask every single person who adds me how I know them. If we have no friends in common, I assume they found me from Sex and the Ivy, but there have definitely been some instances in which the requests come from people I met randomly/a long time ago/while drunk/etc. and I just totally spaced out on the meeting. This is why everyone should include cutesy introductions along with the request. The “add a personal message” option is there for a reason! Anyway, I’ve decided that my Facebook — along with everything else about me online — is not terribly private, so I’m just going to start blind-approving everyone rather than messaging every unfamiliar person about how I met them. But nonetheless, it’d be really nice to get an actual note from people who add me.