dennis yang dot com

I work from home, which means that most of my daily interactions occur in the virtual realm. I feel like my real world social skills are starting to suffer as a result. Apparently, these IM habits that I’ve been learning are not transferable to the real world.

1. The scrollback buffer allows you to multitask.

When you’re chatting with someone via IM, as soon as you’re done with typing your thought, you can switch over to doing something else while the other person is typing and composing their thought. IM clients even have a convenient “audria is typing” notification to let you know that your friend is typing madly away. And then, when they’re finished with their diatribe, you can go back and look at what they’re written, and respond.

Apparently, the “real world” does not have such a buffer. In fact, when speaking with people, you have to listen when they are talking. For someone that is constantly multitasking, I find my mind wandering as soon as I finish my sentence (when I really should be listening). And then I kinda look back at them when they’re done talking, half expecting to be able to “scroll back” and see what they’ve just been saying..

CRAP. Real life has no scrollback.

The other unfortunate side effect of this phenomenon is that now that we’re all conditioned to this constant barrage of information, normal “live” conversation isn’t enough to keep us engaged.

The nice family dinner that used to look like this:

Now looks like this:

2. The internets make you seem really smart and knowledgeable.

So you’re chatting with someone, and they say something like, “Hey, have you heard of the xx?” Now, in the real world, you’d be like.. uh, I have no idea what that is (isn’t that like a Mexican beer or whatever?). But, of course, online, you have the world at your fast fingertips, and if you’re an online citizen worth your salt, you just quickly google it, read up, and then formulate an opinion and respond. “Oh, you mean the band the xx? Yah of course, I’ve been following them since they formed in London in 2005. They’re pretty good.” Voila, you’re really smart.. and super cool.

Since the pace of the conversation in IM is at just about any speed you want, you have ample time to finely handcraft witty responses. Did it just take you 5 minutes to respond with that awesome quip? It’s fine — maybe someone at work walked into your office (but really you were busy polishing each and every word).

Of course, this works really well if you’re trying to impress some girl that you’re trying to woo over IM, since you can intelligently respond to just about any subject that she brings up.

Level 2 skills: Trying to prove a point and Wikipedia doesn’t agree with you? Victory is only a quick Wikipedia edit away.

Now, in the real world, your brain is no longer augmented by the information fire hose that is the internet. In fact, those parts of your brain that used to house said information have now completely atrophied from misuse, and without it, your brain has been reduced to that of a drooling 3 year old.

Sure, you could whip out your iTelephone or whatever and look up stuff, but you really don’t want to be *that guy* do you?

3. You can start & stop conversations whenever you want.

Online, chats can span over several hours or days. Well, actually, this is big complaint I get from Korby; he claims that most of our chats go something like this:

Dennis (11:13am): Hi.
Korby (11:15am): Hi.
Dennis (1:17pm): Hi.
Korby (1:18pm): Hi.
Dennis (3:02pm): Hi.
Korby (3:03pm): Hi.
Dennis has signed off.

Ooops. Uh, yah sorry Korby. Anyway, my point here is that conversations can take a looong time to get through over IM, and there’s really nothing that wrong with starting a conversation, and then pausing it for awhile while you do some other thing, and then re-starting it later. Ok, maybe there is something wrong with it, but at least online, it still works, since it’s pretty much stateless.

Apparently, this is not the case in real life, and people get really annoyed when, mid-conversation, you get up and start making yourself a hot fudge sundae.

Oh wait, what? Sorry, were you still talking?

Ok, rambling done…

Anyway, that’s it for my rant for now. So, if the next time I chat with you, I seem to not be paying attention, please cut me some slack. Augmented reality systems are getting better & better, yah?? Surely live talk bubbles are right on the horizon.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 11:47 pm and is filed under ramblings. 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.