meta

While waiting for a compile, I just sent the following message to a friend -- using ICQ, the "neat new toy" of 5 or 6 years ago:

This livejournal thing I mentioned a couple weeks back turns out to be kind of nifty. (Nifty in the "community" sense, not really the "geek toys" sense. Though it's got a little of that, too.) I've found over the years that there are some usenet groups that I was really only reading for the writings of a few interesting people; the model here is that people write about whatever they like and you find the ones you're interested in following. (And you can jump-start the process by inspecting the sets of people your friends find interesting. So when Ralph pointed me at this the first thing I did was browse all of *his* friends.)

Something like this was probably the subject of somebody's sociology thesis or the like; I wonder what the conclusions were. :-)

sociology

While I was proofing my previous entry the irony of my final comment struck me.

In the early 80s, one of the sociology professors at CMU (Sara Kiesler) did a lot of work studying the behavior of people online vs. face-to-face. It is entirely possible that I am at least partially responsible for that line of inquiry, as a result of a class project I did as an undergrad. You see, I introduced Sara Kiesler to the phenomenon of flaming. :-)

Even though I've never really delved into it (took a couple of classes, and been watching the net for 20 years), I guess I do have some level of curiosity about social phenomena. It's probably partial compensation for my utter lack of face-to-face social skills. :-)