Social Ramifications of New Communication Channels or How Not to Hook Up at the Airport
Posted on August 2, 2008
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Months ago, when I heard Clay Shirky claim that “Technology doesn’t become socially interesting until it becomes technologically boring” I found myself saying “Amen” back to the television. Due to recent events, I’m not so sure if I still agree.
As is usual, technology gets me into trouble, interesting trouble but trouble nonetheless. A few days ago, sitting in Logan Airport while waiting for my flight home from Campus Technology I opened a new app I’d recently installed on my iPhone: Whoshere by myRete. This is how it works. Whoshere scans the network within a given range (you set how far out you want it to scan) and displays little profiles for the other folks who also have Whoshere installed on their iPhone. Click on a profile and start chatting away. Pretty simple. Pretty straightforward. Maybe I’m naive but I thought it would be fun to be able to kill a bit of time chatting with other folks with geeky tendencies. Not so much.
Because I forgot to sign off of the application, before I even opened it I was receiving incoming chats. Lots of chats actually. About 25 to be exact. Twenty five folks in less than 1000 meters who not only had an iPhone but had this app and had it open and running. Pretty cool, right? I thought so until I started scanning down the list of incoming messages. Every single one was from a man. Not a single woman on the list of nearby folks. And every one of them was a pick-up line. Now I might have made myself a bit of a target by using a username with “girl” as part of it but it’s not as if I had some bikini-clad icon for my account. It’s just my logo.
Did these guys seriously think they were going to “hook up” in the frantic fifteen minute layover they were on? I thought surely not but then I asked a few men I know what they thought. What I heard surprised me. Think of the beginnings of the internet, they told me, what was it really for? Porn. Once the lab geeks were done using it to pass messages back and forth between facilities the next in line to make use of it were the chat room cruisers. Why should this be any different, right? Here I am thinking how cool it would be to chat with folks at conferences and find sympathetic souls in airports when your flight is delayed for hours on end. Silly me.
For once, the socially interesting aspects of the technology not only outweighed the technological interest but practically slapped in the face with its “hey baby, I like your logo” forwardness. I can’t accept any kind of “men are pigs” explanation for this and I don’t feel like I should avoid using the application because, if I do, it will always be a cruising app and so will all the others like it.
So what’s the deal? Anyone else want to try to explain this kind of behavior? The reaction to a new communication channel?
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4 Responses to “Social Ramifications of New Communication Channels or How Not to Hook Up at the Airport”
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I felt the same way when first trying out TwitterVision, then again when I got an invite to check out BrighKite (which I’m still using happily). I’m a guy, so obviously, I don’t get the same reactions that a woman might, but I still have hopes that these start to be useful.
I had a similar experience on usenet around 1994. Maybe you just have to ignore such behavior. One jerk you might correct but when the number gets too high I don’t have time to hassle with them.
Seems to me that the technological hurdle is out of the way on this one and the socially interesting is just hitting its stride. Maybe off color or off-putting, but that’s interesting in its own way. As a side note, why does the iPhone insist that the letters i t s in sequence are always a contraction? Is there different grammar in Cupertino?
I’ve been using whoshere and have had the same response. I was hoping to meet people who live nearby and expand my friendship pool. I was open to the concept of meeting someone to date also because I’m single. But even that is twisted when you meet online. It’s a weird dynamic. People you meet on whoshere tend not to want to meet in real life. They are content chatting via the app. Oddly enough they prefer a often crashing app rather than sending a direct text…. this has been true even if we’ve exchanged mobile phone numbers. It’s disappointing that the interweb connection opportunity has been relegated to smarmy hookups and chats that never make it beyond the technology