CIAN: A FACE TO FACE/ NON MEDIATED MEETING Not all the people feel comfortable during an interpersonal communication with a person not very well known. Personally, I feel uncomfortable in a group discussion with people I don’t know. That’s where I prefer technologies to mediate a form of information exchange. It is interesting to see how people who are confident with “computer supported” communication use it when it’s not strictly needed. Cian and I are separated for five days a week, eight or more hours a day by only a floor. So why did we have to agree through e-mail about when and where to meet? I think sometimes technologies are very useful to connect people, sometimes they just help people to increase their laziness. First there was telephone. Then e-mails. Cheaper, faster, less embarrassing. Trustable? Well, yes but with some exception. One of them, Cian’s letter about me, has just been kidnapped by some spiders of the world wide web. During our face to face meeting we were only armed with a couple of pens and notebooks. That is technology too, in a way. We didn’t make use of it, anyway, because hey, we’re humans, not some strange kind of machine and neither journalists, in this occasion. So we let the conversation flow without interrupting it with any: just a sec I take some notes. The risk was that part of the conversation itself could have been lost. And that’s exactly what happened. Technologies are so useful to help people remember things and fill in the gaps of the memory, but it’s also interesting to see what things we remember and try to understand why (I don’t want to slipper now on some psychology issues). What I believe is that face to face interactions are anyway a preferred method to “connect” people who don’t know each other very much. Body language. No mediations. Take your time. A little of embarrassment, maybe, but a lot more of satisfaction. Without considering communication problems, which, in my opinion, increase with distance and level of technology involved, especially for people who are not still confident with a foreign language, like me. SURJ: THE OAK OF THE MOO What is a MOO? What is a MUD? Still unanswered questions for me, even if a tried to discover the meaning of these words with a lot of enthusiasm and a bit of disappointment. Maybe it’s just that it takes some time to get used to them, their language, their virtual space, their fake interactions, and I must admit not to have dedicated much of my time in this effort. Just try it, I said to myself. Lost in a bunch of white words on a black background, in the first MUD (don’t even remember the name)our souls were lost even before meeting each other. I though he was used to them, that he could have been my Virgilius on that occasion, but I was wrong ad, one got bored of stupid questions we were asking to ourselves, we decided to move on. The second meeting trial was set in a virtual 3Dspace with avatars. Yourself watching the world (no others around me). Yourself from the back (no difference. I don’t exist. Identity crisis). I can see Surj now. e seems near, but he’s far as well, as we’re not able to communicate in any forms, neither written nor graphical. But no, we won’t use Icom, as we would like to differentiate ourselves a little bit from the Others (cheap new century’s youth ego). So what? Surj remains a mystery. 1000 monosyllabiques e-mails telling nothing, 1000 missing out each other for just few minutes. Then, resignation. We gave up. Why not trying the phone- he suggested- quite old fashioned but it works, and it’s something like our last resource. Fear. I hate telephone. And then I’m not al the Lab in these days. Mobile could be such a mess (what if you or me are caught in a traffic jam with people shouting and beeping around?). One thing is clear after all this. To agree on the technology to use is pretty hard. To make a good use of them in nearly impossible. GET TO KNOW EACH OTHER CIAN Human connectedness. When it’s an assignment to make two people who work together meet each other it’s a kind of forced concept of connectedness. Or a good chance to know that maybe you’re missing something in your everyday interactions. Not that I say you should talk to everyone or start a deep friendship with all your colleagues, but it’s nevertheless quite sad not to have a chance to know everybody here at MLE. Is it half an hour enough to describe a person? I’m not sure about that. Maybe it’s not so visible, but I have some difficulties to approach people and I’d rather wait for them to bring me out of my lair than being invading. I think Cian and I follow different patterns around the lab everyday; we don’t’ see much each other. But he’s not a completely stranger either. I spoke to him some times, we share few alcoholic memories, some Monday lunch interactions, a few coffee break encounters. I’m fascinated by his smile and his big hands; he seems at the same time shy but resolute and determinate. We felt quite embarrassed about exchanging personal questions in order to discover each other secrets or mysteries; so we mainly talked about work, about our projects, doubts and enthusiasm. We reminded the first time we met, back in June of last year, when we were called for the interview. I wouldn’t remember him, we eventually didn’t talk at all, but we both had the same impression of this place, surprisingly admirable, remarkably beautiful. We recalled the interviews themselves, our conviction that we wouldn’t be accepted, that this was just too much for us. It’s good to share these sensations with someone. I learnt that he doesn’t hang out frequently with people from the lab, because he still has his college friends, who, he says, are still studying Physics at Trinity College. Yeah, eventually, we agree, students’ lifestyle it’s really not bad at all! I ask him if he’s a good programmer. Stupid question, I know, but it’s just my new growing a dmiration for programmers, my personal concerns about how long it will take me to become a good one as well. Our conversation is over. Nearly half an hour, a nice talk and few clues about a person with whom I hadn’t had many interactions before. Well, to be continued, they say. I don’t know if I talked more about Cian or about myself. Sometimes it’s good to know new people so that you can learn more about yourself! SURJ Surj: the unknown virtual friend from Boston. It was supposed to be a quite exciting experiment, to meet a stranger using whatever technology we wanted to. And I just thought that it would have been fun to try one of those Muds or Moos or however they are called. They seemed to me a kind of magic virtual world where everybody can have a different identity, an estranged dimension. So Surj and I could have maybe played with it and decide whether to be ourselves or pretend to be someone else. Not that we had to know each other perfectly after a meeting, but who really cared if the clues we gained from that were true or not. Icom was fine, but everybody was using it, we though, so why not trying to be in some ways original? That turned out to be a not very good idea, though. I don’t know if it was due to my little ability to adapt to new things (I thought I was quite good at that), to a general misunderstanding or to the real difficulty to use these communication tools, facts remain that we still don’t know anything about each other. I was quite worried about this, and then I realised that it was also quite interesting to leave a suspended mystery feeling between us. Our communication at this point consists by a dozen of skinny and fast e-mails made out of circumstance expressions and poor attempts to meet each other in some virtual places. But it was fun anyway. What do I have to talk about then? He looks very nice and talkative, strong British (I hope I’m right) accent. I know he was here at MLE to arrange his photo-table (I don’t remember the exact name), but we didn’t meet at that time too. What else? I know (not sure either about this) he has worked at BBC during the past years, and I think I could say we share some kind of interest toward television as medium, as I spent the last years studying some aspects of it (and doing an internship in a local cable broadcaster). That could have been a good conversation, I think. But it didn’t happened. And not because we didn’t try hard.