I might get turned off by this too.
There's some sort of estimation out there (who knows, maybe I made it up and
am being quoted), that 50% of the people who roam cyberspace are actually researches
who are asking other researchers questions. And even if that's not the case,
lots of people are sticking their noses into what people do on the internet.
But that doesn't mean that I'm not going to stick my nose in as well. I'm more
than willing to jump ito the fray, and if an opportunity to ask some questions
arises, I'll take it. The problem is, of course, that it's not really all that
easy to pinpoint what it is that I want to ask. Here are a few that were sent
by e-mail to someone with wom I'd "talked jazz" over a couple of very
enjoyable conversations:
Do you develop mental pictures of the people with whom you're in contact? If
yes, do you ever try to verify them?
Is the communication aspect of a tool like WinMX important to you, or is getting
the music the important point?
If you establish contact with someone via WinMX, and that contact is terminated,
do you wonder about why this happened? (i.e., is that person no longer interested
in contact, or perhaps it's due to network problems?)
From these questions even I get the impression that I was hoping that someone
else might agree to write this column. After all, if I can't find my own answers
to these questions, why should I assume that someone else might. But what's perhaps
most interesting is the fact that I got a pleasant e-mail response from the person
to whom I sent these questions, but not answers.
With someone else (who was very gracious about the music I took from him) I chatted
for quite a while (late at night my time, of course). It was a very pleasant chat,
that covered numerous topics, and even saved a transcript of it. But when I returned
to it to learn something from my correspondent's answers I discovered that we
hardly dealt with the questions that most interested me. And although we exchanged
e-mail addresses, I never received an answer to my e-mail query that had similar
questions to those I've already listed here.
Other than a couple of short messages here and there, one other correspondent
was the extent of my deeper involvement with people I met in this way. This time,
the contact wasn't initiated by me. As I was downloading a piece of music I received
a message from someone who had obviously browsed the contents of my hard drive.
He remarked that I had a rather strange collection of material. I responded that
I have an eleven year old son whose taste in music still hasn't inherited much
from me. As we continued to chat we realized that we both live in Israel, and
I realized that this was what he was trying to find out from the outset. We exchanged
e-mail addresses, and then spoke on the phone when he agreed to try to answer
some of my questions. But though we had a nice time talking to each other, what
I learned from him regarding my questions was that no, he wasn't particularly
concerned with learning anything about the person on the other side of the download
- something I found strange since when we met he was clearly trying to learn something
about me.
These contacts lead me to think that perhaps I wouldn't have answered queries
of this sort either. At the very least, they were much more than my correspondents
had bargained for when they sought out, or offered for the taking, music on a
P2P network.
Go to: Strangers on a network.