The first friend to introduce me to the pleasures of IM also hooked up webcams to each of our computers before she left the country, so we could see each other -- me here, she halfway around the world -- while we chatted. It was odd to see her pixelated face drifting in and out of motion, sometimes frozen, sometimes expressive, as we talked.
More recently, at the office where I work, my colleagues and I conduct a regular series of dilaogues via IM, as we schedule meetings, share work, and alert one another to stories, websites, or other resources that can help us do our jobs better.
Inside gmail, the email offering from Google that I switched to once I realized I would be leaving the familiar .edu domain at Stanford last year, a number of disconcerting but riveting features have recently become visible. First, gmail scans the words in your messages and dynamically offers links (which companies have purchased) to sites that might have products or services you might be presumed to be attracted to.
In my case, I seem to attract gmail's entire resource list of sites with links titled: "Breaking up?" or "Nursing a broken heart?" or, more bluntly, "Need couples counseling?"
The much more powerful feature gmail provides is the green/orange/gray dot that appears next to the name of other gmail people you are in frequent communication with. When the dot is gray, your friend is offline; when it is orange, (s)he has been online but is inactive; when it is green (s)he is there right now, online and available.
Google has also added a line to the bottom of each email message as you compose it suggesting you can chat with this person just by clicking on this link.
Now, all of this is fine with our normal networks of friends and colleagues and family members; it's nice to see who may be around, and sometimes it makes sense to start a chat, rather than the somewhat slower and less intimate option of regular email.
So, back to the green dot. I have so far invited only one person to join gmail (that's how it works, you have to be invited to get an account.) As she got ready to leave here, and move to Biloxi, she opened up her gmail account, I think in response to my invitation.
Once she got her gmail account, we both unwittingly suddenly had the ability to "see" each other whenever we became available online. At first, I found this disconcerting. In my work, I have to be online most of the time, and gmail is one of the windows I normally keep open on my laptop. Seeing her suddenly appear made my heart flutter, and my hopes rise. If she was online, maybe she would contact me?
The answer, usually, was no. So watching the green dot was not a very satisfying experience for me, though at least I knew she was alive.
Sometimes, however, one of us would prompt the other, and a "chat" would begin. These were chances for us to talk less instantaneously than on the phone but more intimately than on email. It is therefore a new channel, one where the possibility for misunderstanding is high, but also one where each party has at least the chance to use her writing voice, instead of his talking voice. Both people have to be willing to connect in new ways.
We have had some meaningful chats, where we discussed subjects that for whatever reason did not emerge in our face to face talks or in regular email, like jealousy and possessiveness. And she expressed her enduring love directly for me in ways that I never heard from her in person. So from this experience alone, I can attest that chat represents a powerful new way for lovers to connect, disconnect, or possibly reconnect.
I hope her green dot always flickers on, out there in cyberspace; and hope still for the day that our two dots might merge, metaphorically at least. My proposal remains on the table, until one of us tells the other that someone new has administered our relationship its death blow. In that case, our dots will have no choice but to turn permanently gray, spinning away from each other in the vast emptiness of space, never to connect again.
No comments:
Post a Comment