Limited Liability
Ben Hyde’s recent post about “Communities of Limited Liability” I think goes a long way toward explaining why I tend to avoid in-person gatherings of members of various online communities that I participate in. Such meetings seem uncomfortably to change the terms of my involvement with the people that I might interact with in, say, a web bulletin board or IRC channel. There have always been a rare few people that interacting with online gets me interested in a face-to-face meeting, and I have pursued opportunities to follow through on arranging such meetings in a couple of cases, with generally pleasant results. But there seems to be a widespread supposition that because a certain board is, like, so much fun to hang out on online, that one should automatically want to hang out with any and all participants in real life. I’ve never made that connection, and in fact tend to suppose rather that most of the enjoyment in any given online community comes from the preservation of limits to personal contact. I’m even a little shy of threads where the topic calls for going into too much personal detail, whether it’s real names or something more innocuous like clothing style or occupation. (I’m not against picture threads though, for some reason.) I just prefer to see those limits maintained.
I suppose I’m the same way about real-life CLLs. Like in the example that Mr. Hyde gives of urban space - I get weirded out in exactly the same way by an apartment-building neighbor who has too many questions about my life as I do by a scary bulletin board person who presumes I’d like to meet when I really wouldn’t.
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