When is it too soon? Or, an Internet Friend Protocol.

Posted on October 22, 2007 by bipolarlawyercook| Leave a comment

When is it too soon to move from com­ment­ing on someone’s blog to email­ing them directly? To mak­ing IM requests? To exchang­ing cell phone num­bers? To make friend requests on NaBloPoMo and con­tact requests on Flickr? I tell you, the tri­als of not becom­ing a blog-stalker, yet express­ing your blog-admiration nee blog crush appro­pri­ately is way harder than decid­ing whether to send the cute new guy a note, or when to call again after the first date. You don’t want to com­ment on all their posts right away– that’s creepy. And if you start catch­ing up on archives too early? Same thing. But at the same time … the inter­net is no longer the sole province of per­verts, insom­ni­acs, and lonely col­lege stu­dents. It’s a world full of smart, funny, tal­ented peo­ple try­ing to find ways to use the too-speeded up tools of mod­ern life to slow things down, to reach out, to make con­nec­tions, and to express them­selves through some­thing besides con­sumer pur­chases at big box stores.

The other prob­lem is response time. The inter­net makes things instan­ta­neous in so many ways– but at the same time, you can put it down and walk away. If you have more than one email account, you may not check them every day, or leave them open while you browse in another tab. If you’re a lud­dite like me, you don’t have the email for­warded to your cell phone. Or if you’re a lame­ass like me, you go to bed ear­lier than a seven year old.

The only way around it all (and the con­fu­sion and anx­i­ety it may pro­voke) is to be straightforward.

So, my dears– if I’ve blog stalked you or friended or con­tacted you too early, or not got­ten back to you by email right away, don’t take it per­son­ally, or worry that I’m a weirdo. I’m prob­a­bly busy run­ning errands or work­ing late or sleep­ing. If you’re creep­ing me out, I promise I’ll tell you “I think we need a break.” I won’t just stop respond­ing to your com­ments or emails or IM requests. If you promise you’ll do the same, then your vir­tual bunny will be just fine.

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0 Responses to When is it too soon? Or, an Internet Friend Protocol.

  1. jenB | October 23, 2007 at 4:20 am |

    Your bunny will be fine too. I was wor­ried for a moment this was about me stalk­ing you! It isn’t is it? :-)

  2. alejna | October 23, 2007 at 4:44 am |

    I hope I’m not being too forward…Will you be my friend?

    (After hav­ing been invited to be NaBloPoMo friends out of the blue by a cou­ple of peo­ple, I’ve decide to throw cau­tion to the wind, too. I tend to be shy-ish in real life, but well, this seems com­par­a­tively risk-free.)

  3. BipolarLawyerCook | October 23, 2007 at 11:07 am |

    Jen, it’s not!

    Ale­jna, yes!

  4. Angeerah | October 23, 2007 at 1:18 pm |

    I know the feel­ing. There are many folks who blog I admire tremen­dously and feel odd about con­tact­ing them via email. I think it’s the same old inse­cu­rity from mid­dle school (gah!).

    Andrea
    http://frettingthesmallstuff.typepad.com

  5. Magpie | October 23, 2007 at 1:50 pm |

    Yo!

    It is a funny dynamic. But I find that if you com­ment on my blog, I like to email you back (instead of respond­ing in the com­ments, because I nearly never go back and read com­ments after com­ments, so I treat you the way I find it eas­ier for me). Does that mean I’m a stalker?

  6. Who She She | October 23, 2007 at 3:31 pm |

    This is so right on. An acquin­tance and I exchanged blog addresses a few months ago, and things have been strange ever since. It’s like hav­ing sex too early in a rela­tion­ship. Now that we know all of these per­sonal things about each other, how do we start a friend­ship? It’s a brave new world, eh?

  7. nyjlm | October 23, 2007 at 5:31 pm |

    aaack– is it me?
    I have RL friends, really, really good friends, whom I’ve met online, and I’m def­i­nitely always open to ‘meet­ing’ like-minded folks in these here inter­webs.
    I guess I prob­a­bly fol­low people’s cues on whether or not a com­ment­ing rela­tion­ship evolves into a friend­ship, kwim? For me, a big part of com­ment­ing often is want­ing that con­nec­tion– want­ing the blog­ger to know that I get where they’re com­ing from, appre­ci­ate their work, etc.
    ram­bling now *g*

  8. BipolarLawyerCook | October 23, 2007 at 9:40 pm |

    NYJLM, not it’s not you. It’s not any­one. It was a thought I was hav­ing about how quickly friend­ships develop in cyber­space, and a joke JenB made while we were emailing.

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