Here’s lookin’ at you, kid.

Early evening in Chicago.  I’m reading a textbook.  A woman walks in. I recognize her from … ?  After 10 seconds of looking for the Waldo in my head and I spot him.  He’s flying a blue bird, Twitter.  Yes, Twitter.  V added me a couple weeks earlier, we once chatted about a mutual musical interests (Mount Kimbie & Gold Panda).  Unlike me, she’s a 140-master and updates often so I’ve seen her goings-on for the past couple weeks. Sure enough, she writes she’s in that same cafe.

So, what now?  Surely it’s odder to sit quietly and/or communicate with somebody who doesn’t know you’re 10 feet from them. Social media is, at least nominally, social. If she tweets about her thoughts and locations multiple times a day, she must be open to spontaneity.  If anything, it’s creepier and voyeuristic not to say hello, right? Also, she runs a web site that’s cool and I wanted to hear about.  So in the end, I follow my better-to-regret-doing-than-not-doing mantra and go to introduce myself. 

She’s embarrassed despite my unthreatening advance (I wasn’t hitting on her). After the fact, she did what I knew her for, and typed:

Recognized via twitter while tweeting emo shit in the coffeeshop. #thatjusthappened

Unsurprisingly, she didn’t remember our web chats but that wasn’t the point.  I explained that this was the less creepy of my options and thought I’d simply say hi. Apparently though, she shares that she’s stayed incognito in such situations before (read: I violated protocol). 

So if you post your name, photo, thoughts and locations all while easily beginning dialogue with strangers online, an “IRL” sponto hello doesn’t fly. It seems awkward won, so I returned to my book after an odd goodbye and left the cafe soon after.

Doubly embarrassed, as the boy was very nice.

Ha.  So my being friendly is more embarrassing?  Somebody get me a copy of Book for Kids Who Can’t Tweet Good.  Still, I’m trying to take positives from my odd pseudo-rejection.

On platforms like Twitter at least, social media is much more media than social, no matter how open and “friendly” users (who I thought were once people too) are. This comes as no surprise to most but I had some naïve idea that the divide between web and world is not so wide.  If anything, I can rest comfortably in my wider world of webonymity.  With that, I guess, see you later — in silence…

img: thx.