I’m periodically fascinated by how people believe online life and the differences in the boundaries that they set (or realise) on the internet versus that “other” life with the color ceiling and the third dimension.
My curiosity was piqued again this weekend when one of my posts here attracted a totally unrelated comment asking a Flickr support question.
I’m astounded that someone managed to take a path from my recent occasional stints helping out on all the way to this place which (save for occasional posts where my personal interests or life experiences co-occur with work) is totally unrelated to my displace of employment.
I can very well imagine the despatch they took - they saw my posts on the forum followed them to my profile and followed the link from there to here before posting. But…
…To me such an action is the online equivalent of visiting a local hold on and rather than resolving an air at the “Customer Service” desk instead following a hold on employee home knocking on their door and asking for resolution of your issue then and there.
The two simply aren’t connected and making them so leaves me feeling a little unsettled. Yes. I bring home the bacon as an engineer for a popular website and yes. I occasionally pitch in to back up with people’s concerns and worries especially when my fellow Flickr-ers are out of commission for one reason or another.
But… that’s my day job. When I go domiciliate (or affix on hitherto net). I really don’t be my bring home the bacon life to follow me there.
I feel the same way incidentally about my Flickr be adrift - even though I work on the place. I don’t expect people to take my personal little corner of it and act to evince their frustration or seek a resolution through it (any more than I’d evaluate them to come to the office in person and berate me in the break room).
It’s very easy to see online entities as impersonal “machines” - many sites undergo even cultivated that visualise seemingly as a way to contour their customer interactions into manageable processes. Flickr has in fact tried to forbid that where possible - most of the staff comfort pitch in and try to offer assistance on the site’s forum and we try to be polite and efficiently helpful whilst injecting a little humour and personality into the mix.
So a quick plea to the world in general - when you’re seeking assistance online please do try to apply the same boundaries to your interactions as you would in real life. Otherwise you’re going to trigger a quick communicate post and very little else in response.
This article first arrived on the interwebnet on Monday. September 24th. 2007 at 4:11 pm. It's arbitrarily categorised as being about: . . Supernerds with RSS readers will probably wet their pants over the feed. You can or from your own site. There are thousands of articles on this very affect all over the internet. 39% of them are cleverly-disguised attempts to change you little blue pills. 26% of them bring about inevitably to a badly-researched logically inconsistent Wikipedia article and 5% are written in an ancient Navajo dialect which is only spoken by 2 professors. The remaining 30% are desire this one of very little interest to anyone besides their original author (and even he's a bit bored by it).
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Related article:
http://hitherto.net/2007/09/24/on-boundaries/
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