At one time when I had achieved a very modest amount of fame I stared to have a problem with phone calls. People would ring up at any time of night or day and start pumping voice assuming that (a) I was awake (b) I was available for their entertainment. When this got depressing I had my phone made ’silent’. I’ve done that twice – it seems normal to me coming from a psychiatrist’s family – most of my siblings have private numbers to control the flow of people bugging them.
Growing up, we’d have people show up on the doorstep looking for my dad that had to be ‘encouraged’ to get the hell out. One awful day a woman rang to say she’d bought an apartment overlooking the family’s house and she was watching me. I don’t know how but it seemed to be fixed rather quickly.
My own phone calls could be amusing after the fact. The guy from Seattle that pretended to be a member of Pearl Jam and wanted to give me ‘the key to the city’. Best line: “I’m looking at a photo of my mother shaking hands with Sammy Davis Jnr.” Not so amusing was the guy in British Columbia that insisted that I was sleeping with him (by remote control? UFO?). But as modest fame became much more modest the phone calls stopped. I still don’t answer the phone ever. I feel sorry for people who actually have real fame, I understand why they go insane.
In the early days of email there were fewer people online. It was a given that the other person would be just some harmless dweeb and most mailing lists and chats would be just nerd rage mixed with computer babble. Most lunatics would send snail mail and you could just laugh it off. My old ***@next.com.au address would get some spam but I could just delete that. In that time I started a series of discussion forums, Twister 2 to 5, of which Twister 3 lasted a very long time. It was good at the start, not at the end. Various twists and turns never really fixed it up. That’s OK, culture changes. The Internet is the street now.
And email changes too. My public email address now has three layers of filter over it. All sevcom addresses refuse mail the first time it is sent and only on the second attempt – that catches most spam. Then comes Avast anti virus which lets off a siren for every suspicious mail – it can blast away for some time each morning. Then comes the black list – all the tedious attempts to play mind games, all the schizophrenic young men and alcoholic harpies and false friends start pouring into the Delete folder. Usually that leaves only a few messages I want to see.
That mode of communication is not working. I know a few people who have given up email, but they are big people that have staff that suffer it for them. The wife just looks at my mail and runs screaming. I can’t escape the noise but I am going to take steps to separate public from private – a new need-to-know email address for a start.
When people continue to talk of online community they seem to me like ‘game theorists’ who never play games. Plenty of ideas, no actual experience. Online community is like running a church hall, all Christian patience and thin soup. Tomorrow I go to a conference and I am sure there will be a talk of ‘online community’. Better you than me …
More positive note: It’s impressive to see how Something Awful has managed to run forums for so many people for so long, when they’re pretty much random dweebs. A mixture of small payment, probations and bans. It works. I’m jealous. I could never even get to the small payment.
More positive note: Right now I’m building a bunch of virtual ‘radios’ that play weird little ‘broadcasts’, mostly for fun, but also nostalgic for the (manufactured memory) of broadcast. I used to like listening to the shortwave radio to hear the strange sounds and speeches from very far away. It is enough just to hear something make a curious sound, without having to build a society out of it.
