Imagine all the Lovely People

This is how I would like to express my feelings as to my experience with LamdaMOO:
:feels alienated
Lavender_Guest feels alienated
Only one person talked to me, because I thought it normal for some reason to
Look in cardboard box in Animu. [I suppose this is how you learn social skills by making these awkward mistakes...]
When I tried to say
“Hi, I’m new here
the MOO responded with
I don’t understand
By the time I could respond and try again to say
“Hi, I am new here
(Maybe the apostrophe messed something up)
Animu leaves room and door resolutely shuts behind him
: feels incredibly socially awkward
Lavender_Guest feels incredibly socially awkward

(but don’t we already know that when we communicate we put ourselves out there to be vulnerable)

(And isn’t this text format quite annoying an hard to read)

Not such a normal, social skills building experience. Nor is encountering 101 cyber characters in a hot tub. I now know how to navigate a MOO after my long tutorial though. That might turn out to be a useful like skill

But to be less cynical...
The article by danah boyd was quite fascinating. Never would I have thought that social network sites were linked to the labor movement and compulsory schooling, but that is all in the social import of these pervasive sites. Nor would I have ever thought about how they were helping me to prepare for the real world. But I sympathize totally with the girl who tells how she created her blog with pictures and descriptions of her vacations so that people would be her friend. As a 14 year old, of course I thought that having the latest music and the most insightful blog posts would cause some one who I “liked” who probably wasn’t even aware of my existence and had no reason to frequent my page. I guess that was how I made the mistake of expecting things to happen on their own.

One networked public I know very well is the Brown Class of 2012 group. As the creator, I started it because as as someone who was deferring her admission to the class of 2011 to go abroad, I didn’t fit into the 2011 imagined community. I also wanted a way to visualize the group of people who were also deferring. I watched the 2012 group transform from a small, close-knit group of seven people into a vibrant, hopping group of thousands by the time the semester started. Although I barely read any of the content of the page, because I had my own community with which to interact in Israel (and the fact that our internet sucked), others used it to find their future roommates, discuss what clubs they were going to do, and form bands. Now, the group page is totally dead. The group served as a community when it needed to be imagined but now that we no longer have to imagine it, no one but 2013 prospectives and people who are looking to advertise for their various websites and campus events use the group.

Admining a dead group takes a little bit of the pressure off of my shoulders... except when I use my admin powers to send messages the entre freshman class
:grins guiltily
Lavender_Guest grins guiltily