maupuia calling

It’s 8pm on a Saturday night. The kids are watching television. Michael is down in his office, and I’m in my little office space in the house. Separated, but… we’re chatting online together!

Welcome to the new generation of marriage… communication conducted at the end of a wireless connection.

Seriously, Michael and I communicate much better online than we do face to face. I have learned by much trial and error that if I need to ask him something tricky, it’s way better to do it by email than to ring him.

Michael is so not a phone person. At least not with me. Phone conversations to him are purely functional. Call the person. Ask the question. Get the answer. Say goodbye. No extraneous chitchat, how’s your day, how are you feeling, do you love me? None of that touchy-feely, girly stuff.

But online, he comes to life. He jokes. He laughs. He’s unstressed. He smiles.

We communicate well online, and we’ve started doing it more often as a couple.

Strange but true.

———-

Tomorrow night I’m seeing danah boyd speak at The Great Blend in Wellington. I’m looking forward to it. She is doing research on identity and social networking phemonena like MySpace.

I’m interested in hearing her, because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how much of my identity is slowly being transferred online.

I have:

• - five email accounts, all of which I use.
• - a Google home page with all sorts of RSS Feeds.
• - a Flickr account, which i use daily
• - a Tada list
• - a Del.icio.us account
• - a TradeMe account
• - two blogs (and going to start a third which will be a photoblog).
• - an Amazon account and a Wishlist that I actually use to buy things from
• - Gmail chat
• - online Scrabble games
• - a number of blogs that I loyally follow - both personal and not so personal
• - more friends online than off

There are people I have known for ten years - only online. I consider them good friends, but I have never “met” them.

Yet I have found it very hard to reconcile this online life with my offline life. Most of the people I know in my “real” life - family and friends - do not understand “online”. They don’t get it. They might do a bit of emailing, have some photos online, do online banking. But they don’t LIVE online. They go to the Internet for a specific reason - to pay a bill, send an email, buy something, put up a photo for the rest of the family to see.

But they don’t hang out online. They don’t have an online life. They don’t understand why somebody would even write online, especially if it’s personal. To them, it’s a tool. Not a place.

So I’ve always felt slightly ashamed of my online life. Like it’s a dirty little secret that I don’t want anyone to know about.

And it’s not like I even hang out in places like MySpace. I confess that I don’t understand MySpace, but I guess I’m not the target demographic for it. It seemed, from my brief introduction to it, like a whole lot of 18-25 year olds looking to get laid. I think somebody (was it Kathy Sierra?) said it was like a permanent spring break in Florida. (Although I’ve been assured that it’s much more than that!)

I did have a Mulitply account for awhile, and even ventured into Orkut (a whole lot of middle-aged people wanting to get laid).

But they bored me. Not wanting to get laid myself, there was nothing that connected me to those people.

Flickr is my main online social networking space, and that at least has a focus that brings me together with other people there - a love of photography.

———

The distinction between “real” and “online” has never existed for me. It’s all real.

At the moment, I’m trying to bring the two together as much as I can so that I don’t feel this chasm… schism… call it what you will… between my two selves.

And part of that means bringing some of my real life online. Like chatting… with my husband!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 27th, 2006 at 8:52 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.