I actually feel more anonymous at Unfogged than I would at many real-life social venues and relationships. (Not in any hard way, given that my real name is easily available, but in a soft way like you're talking about in the post.)

Easy; a little hacking and it should be pretty straightforward to connect a bluetooth heart rate monitor directly twitter, so it can send everybody a message if you're dead.

Hmmm, now that you mention it have not seen anything recently from the Fount of All Deletia.

My mother checked in on a neighbor daily for one to several years because the neighbor had a terror of lying dead and her children never came around much. The mother of one of my sister's friends did lie dead for several days. Apparently she hadn't been networking effectively.

Easy; a little hacking and it should be pretty straightforward to connect a bluetooth heart rate monitor directly twitter, so it can send everybody a message if you're dead.

A little more hacking, and unbeknownst to you it will start telling twitter every time you have sex.

5: combine the two, and you could make a mint selling To Catch A Necrophiliac to MSNBC!

1 -- You think you're anonymous, then you find out that someone you know has a step-daughter commenting, and then the world starts looking small again. A kindergarten classmate of mine was Hilzoy's best friend in college. One or two degrees of separation all around us.

Sites like facebook are starting to add ways to deal with this by giving you opportunities to prioritize which kinds of information you get and about whom.

8: That's good. I'd like to see Facebook offer a way to prioritize who gets your own information, to what degree.

In general, though, the whole Twitter/Facebook blah blah thing continues to discomfit me. Oh well.

♠Parsimon has become discomfited.

8 is the key. I accept all the high school acquaintances as facebook friends, and then immediately tell facebook not to show me any info about them in my feed.

Facebook is kind of blowing my mind; I just signed up not three weeks ago, and it's been blast after blast from the past ever since. Which I don't respond to most of the time, so now everyone's going to think I'm dead? Too much for me to handle.

Which reminds me: What ever happened to Flippanter?

10 is hilarious.

13 -- I wondered the same thing by seeing a comment from him not long ago. (Two weeks, maybe).

drop 10 facebook friends and get a free whopper

This thread reminded me to respond to a friend of mine from high school who sent me a facebook message this afternoon asking if he could use me as a reference. So, thanks.

16: My roommate took 'em up on that offer tonight. There's nothing to convince me that BK's marketing people aren't high-high-high and still hittin' home runs. Angry Whopper? Whopper Virgins? It's outta left field every time, and I kind of like that, even if, personally, yeah, their product sucks. They should sell UHC.

@8 --- yeah, you can filter by topic and you can also just select any news item and say "Less about ... " and then you get fewer stories about that person.

and it's been blast after blast from the past ever since

I hate this. Generalizing in an effort to pretend my reaction isn't rooted in my own neuroses, massive personal and social forgetting is pretty important to society. Identity is about making connections, sure, but also about severing them. To be constantly carrying around an active network encompassing everyone within three degrees of you, together with all of their photos of you from 1989 or whatnot, seems like some dystopia where cutting-edge technology transports you back to a pre-modern world where everyone in the village knows everything about you.

12: JesusMcQueen, you must acquiesce to the will of the Facebook, it wants you, and you have no power over it.

You know what the problem is? The world population is higher than 150.

18: It's funny, for years and years BK's advertising and marketing were atrocious and their campaigns were terrible and ineffective. They do seem to have improved a lot lately. Probably hired a new firm.

To be constantly carrying around an active network encompassing everyone within three degrees of you, together with all of their photos of you from 1989 or whatnot, seems like some dystopia where cutting-edge technology transports you back to a pre-modern world where everyone in the village knows everything about you.

I sometimes kind of feel like this too, but at a certain point the phenomenon Becks mentions in the post kicks in and the amount of information becomes so overwhelming that we're right back to postmodern alienation. That is, everyone potentially knows everything about you, but the vast majority of people don't care and don't bother to find out anything in particular.

19.2: I'm right there with you on that analysis. (Or else we have shared neuroses, let's make sure to stay in touch!) My personal freight train is already pulling enough baggage as it is.

If I friend Jesus, will he send me wine? (Cutting the existential angst crap to get to the real question).

(To be fair, the whole FB business is a whole lot more intrusive for someone Becks' age than mine. Maybe 5% of my high school class is on, and we share mutual disinterest.)

19: Generalizing in an effort to pretend my reaction isn't rooted in my own neuroses, massive personal and social forgetting is pretty important to society.

Seriously: it's not neurotic to find that there are people, perhaps whole swaths of people, you're not in touch with for reasons entirely your own. You have -- one has -- a right to that. It's peculiar to suppose that the properly conducted life must include everyone one has known.

Possibly relevant sidenote to 17: I hadn't seen the friend in question literally since high school until he and his family unexpectedly walked into the visitor center here a few weeks ago. He was pretty surprised to see me, and we talked a bit. When he found out what I was doing here, he became pretty interested in the program I'm doing and decided it might be a good thing for him and his girlfriend to do. I didn't hear from him again until today, when he asked if he could list me as a reference on his application. Sounds like he's going to do it this summer, which is nice to hear.

Small world, man. That's the only instance since I've been here of someone I know showing up unexpectedly, but there have been a lot of times when I've been talking to a visitor and find out that they know someone I know. There have been a couple of those instances just in the past few days.

Carp, if you sincerely friend Jesus, wine!

But if you're a hypocrite -- straight to Hell. Nobody fucks with the Jesus.

I've seen addons for (I think) Wordpress that can issue you reminders like "It's been X time since you last saw a post at Y".
I think that sort of thing is the long-run cure for the unnoticed death, if you set it for the people you actually care about.

To be constantly carrying around an active network encompassing everyone within three degrees of you, together with all of their photos of you from 1989 or whatnot

I must have been even more of an asshole (or even less interesting) than I thought in high school, because while I'm FB friends with a few people I knew back then I haven't gotten this at all. Most of my FB friends are either current friends or ex-coworkers.

(That said, there are some people whose friend invitations I've accepted only to almost immediately regret it.)

27 -- Oh sure. There are a ton of people I know right now that I'm not particularly interested in. On the other hand, there are people I've met at pretty much every stop along the way who are interesting enough to sustain a relationship of some kind.

I'm not bothered by someone who finds my presence in their life more important than I find theirs in mine.

I've cheerfully avoided friending people that I intentionally stopped being friends with. It's the marginal cases that are tough.

I've unfriended about five people, all girls who went to high school with me, never talked to me because I was a nerd, and now use Facebook as a venue for putting up huge photo albums of drunken debauchery, a la "Late Night Shots" but without all the privacy. Getting constant updates directing me to these things j just makes my originally-neutral opinion of somebody more and more negative.

Then Facebook came up with the option where you can push the button to say "I want to get [less / more] updates about this person." Oh well, I'm sure they don't care.

I'm not bothered by someone who finds my presence in their life more important than I find theirs in mine.

I'm bothered by people I know in one capacity being given the right to know me in my Facebook identity. I know, I know, keep two FB identities -- but honestly, I'm not inclined to go through contortions in order to accommodate a social networking phenomenon that's a pure invention. There is email.

I'm bothered by people I know in one capacity being given the right to know me in my Facebook identity.

You can give people access to a limited profile. I've done so for a couple of relatives (my father's sister, etc.).

But will facebook die?

You can give people access to a limited profile.

Oh. Well, I'll have to investigate that. As far as I knew, you could only limit what you see about others, not what they see about you.

I hardly use facebook at all these days, but whenever I do stop by I find it kind of fascinating to see how many people I've known in various ways over the years.

As far as I knew, you could only limit what you see about others, not what they see about you.

Why does it have to be a technological solution to this problem? I solve it by just not posting anything of interest.

If I friend Jesus, will he send me wine? (Cutting the existential angst crap to get to the real question)

Manly Jesus appreciates directness. But no!

40: Yeah, that's been my approach. I call it: ignoring. If I die, nobody will notice if I cease pinging the grid.

Addendum to 41: Actually, I have recently tracked down some wine mailers in order to send Josh and Magpie the bottle I owe them, and anyone interested in wine swaps can email me. No need to friend me, even.

||

Two people I know reasonably well just split up.

Is it horrible that my first thought was thank god they waited till after graduation?

To make it kinda topical, Facebook did just help me avoid what could have quite an awkward moment, so! Go Facebook!

|>

(Did I use the funny symbol things right?)

The next BK ad campaign.

|| Yikes. Obama moves John Brennan upstairs to the White House . Not good.

the neighbor had a terror of lying dead

then it happened and she found out it wasn't so bad after all?

I'm an atheist, so Jesus is already dead to me.

My friend in Alaska knew a fisherman whose only fear was drowning and being eaten by crabs. Thank god he died out of the water. Presumably he was happy with that.

34 -- Another benefit of aging: who said what to whom in high school loses relevance at an increasing pace.

I was just recently visiting a HS friend I hadn't seen in 25 years. We were completely unable to figure out when and how we'd met. None of our mutual friends were any help at all. This sort of thing is probably for the best.

I suspect this guy's finding false comfort. Most people would think 'huh, guess he hasn't had much to say' and not give it a second thought.

Here's what Facebook is incredibly perfect and awesome for: replacing high school reunions. Do you really want to fly home and spend a day talking to these people? No, you want to know what they look like these days and what their occupation is, and if they mated and/or reproduced.

Then, if you want to talk to them, have at it.

Also for getting me in touch with friends from summer camp many moons ago.

I solved the Facebook prioritization problem by only adding people who I see, physically, more or less weekly. That makes it a useful calendar of local events and keeps it from becoming a phone book. Besides, I'm not that interested in the daily activities of old college or high school acquaintances and if I suddenly want to know what one of them is doing, I'll call and ask.

Last fall, a friend of mine did disappear from Facebook. I assumed he was bored with it, not dead. (Actually, his boss was harassing him with it, I learned later.)

who said what to whom in high school loses relevance

This ever had relevance? The mind boggles.

Soup biscuit doesn't even have a high school.

well, that's true.

Or more correctly, I've sort of half got 4, or something odd like that.

Anyway, it's not like I didn't know people at the time and age... and my comment was because I just can't imagine anything that was actually a product of that very artificial social framework having really lasting relevance. Clearly it does for many, it just seems bizarre to me.

Soup biscuit has enough high schools to necesistate a high school rack.

56: I suspect it might be different for someone who went to one high school in the same town where they grew up, for while it's an artificial experience, it's also all one has in a lot of cases, and it happens at a formative time of life.

Also, I'm sure Soup has people and conversations that were important and meaningful to him when he was 15-18 years old. High school is a ludicrous construct in lots of ways because almost everybody is forced to be there and it has lots of arbitrary rules, but that doesn't mean it's very strange for it to serve as a backdrop to someone's important and meaningful friendships and conversations.

Which seemed overly humorless as soon as I hit "post".

58: Yeah, I can believe that, but it's still weird. I mean, a lot of conversations have to boil down to "wow, we did some stupid things when we were young and stupid, didn't we", "yeah".

Regardless of the (joking) tone of my first comment on this, I'm not misunderstanding how important it is for many at the time, but it seems to me that part of actually growing up is realizing how unimportant that sort of thing actually was. Bemused remembrance I understand.

60 -> 61

Thank Goodness Becks is still alive! I've been so worried.

I think Becks is exactly right in the original post. Less life-or-death example: In a way, the whole point of tools like RSS readers is to offload checking in on things to see if there's something new. When there's a glitch, like the reader is buggy or a feed is busted, I might not notice for weeks or months, because I've already delegated paying attention to that away.

But the solution might be to get an obituaries feed crossed with my Facebook friends, or something ridiculous like that.

Death to this thread! Will anyone notice, with the flurry of posts next door?

Thank Goodness Becks is still alive! I've been so worried.

Is she? That's good to know. Ever since she renounced her slave name and became Dos Equis I'd lost track of her.* The person now using the Becks identity is clearly not her.

I'm also rather worried about myself. Not having mirrors, I haven't seen myself in some time.

* link to archives unavailable due to cloudy and overcast conditions in the infosphere and sunspots weakening the google fu.

I know, I know, keep two FB identities

Yeah, this is what people kept suggesting after I unfriended everyone I work with and started refusing requests from people tangentially connected with work. Too much bother.

I also have a hard time grasping how people have hundreds of FB friends -- I'm not even sure I know, much less like, that many people. Periodically, this makes me feel like a big anti-social loser. Which would make a decent status, come to think of it!

67.first. It seems linked in or something like that makes a lot more sense for work-related stuff anyway.

My friend in Alaska knew a fisherman whose only fear was drowning and being eaten by crabs.

You need a crab tank at your hog farm.

5: a little more hacking still and it could work as a polygraph.

"Ben W-lfs-n is really excited about the meetup! (Admin: this post is 80% likely to be a lie.)"

31 makes me wonder where the dividing ine is between when FB updates from your age cohort is bothersome and when it's not.

At my last high school reunion, the number of people who were like, "ur, what is this internets thing you're making your living off of?" was pretty staggering to me. Other than the handful of people who were my fellow nerdling early-adopters, I got the impression that yes, people were aware the Internet existed, they probably had e-mail through work or a Flickr account to show off photos of the kids to the grandparents, but they didn't live on the net the way I or my work peers do.

Also, 43 is noted, greatly appreciated and gleefully anticipated.

Several years ago an older friend of mine would check on his elderly former secretary every once in a while. As luck would have it, he was out of town on vacation when she fell down her back steps and broke her hip. It was two days before her neighbors her her pleas for help. She survived the ordeal, but just barely.

There is a fine line for the elderly between independent living and being eaten by the cats.

72: This is why, when I get older, I plan on having a couple of Cheetahs instead of my current housecats. If I'm going to be eaten it's not going to be by some pussiefied feline.

Off-topic, but would any of you DC people know of someone in need of a roommate for the spring (until June)? I'm going to be arriving about as soon after the 20th as I can. I can't leave before the 19th and I'm assuming I won't be able to find a place to stay on/before/just after the inaugural. I would like to find a place with fewer than 3 roommates. And for various reasons it might work out better in the long run to live in Maryland, but mainly I need to find a place where I don't need a car.

DC appears to have stopped pinging the grid.

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ll

For months I've been trying to recover from a broken heart; someone I will likely never see again and who has no web presence to speak of. I kept reflexively googling his name until one day I discovered his son's blog. Whenever I felt down (very often) I would check in to it, and felt some comfort in this. He's a university student, a good writer, and it's a small blog. I completely forgot about the sitemeter. Son has concluded he has an insane stalker. I have apologised (pseudonymously) and have vamoosed. I feel toe curling embarrassment reporting this, and hope (as has happened in the past) that confessing to unfogged will bring meaning to this private horror by making someone, somewhere, laugh.
ll>

Oh, Abby. No laughs here. So sorry to hear this; you sound very sad. On the upside, he has no idea who you are, right?

77: Regularly checking a blog is not a sign of insane stalking. He is obviously mistaken, not just in the specific case, but also in the larger general case of regular blog-checking being a sign of anything other than an interest in the contents of the blog.

You are absolved of all guilt, shame, embarrassment etc.

Wow, that's totally my phobia. I'm insanely scattered at work, and it comes out in compulsive clicking around -- anyone whose blog I'm even vaguely aware of, I click on like, twelve times a day (that is, I act this way with a couple of dozen blogs) (how do I ever get any work done? That's an excellent question). And occasionally I worry that everyone I've ever encountered online believes I'm stalking them.

Bloglines is an excellent way to outsource this phobia. Sitemeter looks a lot less interesting when it's an aggregator site visiting.

Too old to be ashamed: I developed a total crush on Peter Cetera's backup singer. I googled around until I got a positive ID. I had assumed she was his trophy bride, because she didn't actually sing much but just stood there looking wonderful, but it was his snowboarder daughter. I may have visited the site more times than I should have after figuring that out.

78, 79,80: I am so moved and grateful. Not only do I not get mocked but I get empathy, absolution and great feed advice.

Thanks, togolosh. I was going to say, 'oh yeah?, but how about five pings a day?' but if LB does this too, that's good enough for me. I honestly had no idea anyone else not off her rocker did this, and I can be a bit obsessive in all areas, and this broken heart business has left me feeling a bit afraid of craziness to begin with.

I am sad, AWB, and reading at your place has helped quite a bit lately. The stupid thing is, it wasn't even a romantic relationship, it was a truly vibrant and excellent platonic friendship, a work partnership that was really getting good. We got used as a two person team, with great success.

Because of the type of work it is, we got to know a lot about each other very fast, we probably overshared a lot of information, we developed "thick trust" in a couple of months. We respected each other's marriages and monogamy, I don't think I'm fooling myself here.

I loved him and hoped I'd still know him and be friends with him when I got old, that kind of thing. Then this 'vibe' started developing between us, and I thought, well, it happens, address it and get it out of the way or the friendship's toast.

At first all seemed excellent, we both wanted to keep this friendship, talk about it with our partners, neither of us was looking for an affair, we were on the same page. But when the project ended, he wanted a complete end to any communication.

Then he began to frame the whole thing as if I'd been persuing him, making demands on him, and he wanted out. I felt like I was going mad. I reviewed our correspondance and nothing like that had happened. It was awkward and hurtful for our partners, and I had expected the friendship might not survive, but I'd sort of envisioned us shaking hands and sadly calling it quits, not him slightly chastising me and forbidding me to talk to him.

I don't know why it matters to me how it ended, but it does. And I still, weirdly, miss him. I don't find someone I can really talk with all that often; our oddnesses matched up pretty well and I respected his work.

A huge thanks for listening, unfogged.

...and no, thankfully the server's located in a city rather than in tinycanuckville (yeah, it's me).

Abby, that sucks.

I had a very roughly parallel situation once. Not as extreme, but a friend started adding very weirdly like that, borne out of her and her partner fighting about our friendship. Partner had put her on the defensive, and I guess it was easier to paint me as the "problem". It was pretty disconcerting at first though, as it made me question my memory of basically every interaction we'd had. Luckily for me, she wasn't a really good friend and I could walk away from it more bemused than hurt....

Don't let it get you down too much. Maybe their relationship required a sacrifice.

Yeah, Abby, I've been in a similar circumstance lately, and it sucks.

86 used to have a long, detailed commiserating story attached, but I 86ed it.

Handy about the numbering then, AWB.

Don't let it get you down too much. Maybe their relationship required a sacrifice.

soup is exactly right. This happens all the time.

Don't let it get you down too much. Maybe their relationship required a sacrifice.

I've been framing it to myself this way, because it helps me feel the whole thing's not pointless. I actually do want him to have a happy life.

86 used to have a long, detailed commiserating story attached

I want this! Please!

90.2: Well, it's all just sort of sad, really. I'm good with platonic friendships that don't have a steep intimacy arc. When you're work/school chums with someone and, within a few months, sharing your most intimate thoughts, and eventually hearing things like "I don't have anything like this with anyone else" and "I am coming to realize that I love you," you'd maybe be starting to think that this person is interested in having some sort of more physically intimate relationship. And, in fact, he is, as he begins intermittently kissing and nuzzling you one evening. Then he stops talking to you, probably because he blames you for the fact that he has some girlfriend he's never mentioned and it's your responsibility, as the girl, to make sure nothing physical happens between yourself and any man ever.

There's a set number of times one is allowed to visit a blog per day, after which one is guilty of stalking? Eek. Um, AWB and Megan and SEK and Josh Marshall and many others, I really didn't know that. There's no need for that restraining order. Yet.

Oh, and for those following the AWB-gets-asked-out-by-married-dude thing from the other night, we went out and had a really fun time and I felt no pressure or creepiness at all.

I did not go out with AWB, comment juxtaposition notwithstanding.

93: yay for non-creepiness.

Yeah, going out with ari would be creepy.

Ari'd probably just sit in the corner and stare at you and not come talk to you.

It's true. Whenever I go out with myself, it's invariably creepy. That's why I've mostly taken to staying in.

I didn't stare, Jetpack. I talked to my friend and wondered why you stood me up. I was hurt, yes, but still dignified.

If you'd stared a bit, you would probably have seen us. That bar wasn't very big.

I saw that bar before anybody.

100: that Ari's a fearful creature.