I got stalked, harassed, and nearly (I did leave on my own) thrown out of college in 1995 because of attracting the attention of a very deranged person. The only reason why things ended without a lot more difficulty for me was because the person ended up in jail in the state they lived in for some related behavior. All of it started online, and got carried off into offline behavior via telephone.

Yet here I am on this site talking about it using the same nom de plume that I used then. I don’t have a blog, and don’t normally even read blogs except for super-geeky technical things. No offense, but it’s been a matter of focus, not dislike per se.

I also use other aliases, and my real name in different places too.

Some of the most important things I say I say anonymously because when I do that people have to consider what I say, not who I am. Some of the most important things I do, I do somewhat anonymously.

There are plenty of instances when privacy is important. There are a lot of varieties of privacy too. There’s different types of online and offline privacy for all that matter.

The thing that can matter the most is civility too. Without it, the internet would have failed miserably. The Internet seeks to route around sources of damage to others. It’s even arguably developing collective immunity systems. There have been plenty of instances where /b/ could be compared to a microphagic component in an immune response for instance.

I work on very strange things for a living. I don’t really have an ‘ittybiz’ of my own. I do contract computer consulting some, but even have little interest in that compared to the things I work on full time. However, I have a product I’m doing research and development on that has commercial potential. I also have a ‘good’ domain name sitting on a 10 year lease ‘going to waste’ and have some vague idea of doing something with the name at some point… So I ended up poking around here because of the latter, but landed on the site because I came across some insightful thing Naomi had said that someone else had linked to…

-G

PS, now, I’m not the sort of person who gets stalked. I do however help people occasionally who have those kinds of problems.

A couple of months ago, I overheard a relative say something about my parenting style. Because I admire this person & would do *anything* for them, their comment DEVASTATED me. I’m still not sure I’m completely over it. We’ll find out when I see everyone at Christmas, I guess.

So yeah, you’re so right. It sucks. A lot. Even more so from someone we know.

Social media in a lot of cases is relinked, rebuilt, and reused ideas about communications that we mostly have already had in forms that were less known, or less useful.

So, when thinking about it, one of the most useful things to do is compare the activities of people with what they would be doing if this were not communication via a keyboard. It’s easier to know what to say to discourage bad behavior that way too. In some cases, taking the communication ‘offline’ & to voice or a personal meeting can solve problems better than continuing down a road of online flaming…

Yes Gary, it was probably a good exercise for you to realize the hype of social media is just that: hype.

What we are really dealing with are tools. Human psychology hasn’t changed much. We want to know what we want to know, and these tools enable us to do so.

The rest? Just make sure you close the damn bathroom door and flush your authenticity down the toilet…and don’t forget to jiggle the chain while you’re at it.

“It’s not a gimmick. It’s real. It’s honest. It’s me and you working together towards a common goal—making your dream a reality. Drawing out some logo or graphic is easy, but I want to do more than that. I want to collaborate with you. I want to realize your hopes and ambitions and have us both get excited about bringing those concepts alive.”

I like to be honest about everything I do. I may not tweet about what I had for breakfast, but then that’s only because I feel those type of things aren’t really profiting anybody. I mean, I could see it in a phone conversation, but it has no real application on a social media site.

I like to reserve my honesty to speaking about who I am and what I do and the things that led me to where I am today. These things matter in the business world more than what I did when I went to bed.