

I Want You to Want Me - gabriel
http://therumpus.net/2009/05/i-want-you-to-want-me/

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wannabetechgeek
This was a beautiful written and very compelling essay. I enjoyed every word
of it and thank HN for sharing this with its readers.

I recently experienced a little dust-up online, where a blogger posted my
Tweets and Twitter profile in order to retaliate against me (long story). I
wanted to crawl into a hole and disappear - shut down my Twitter account,
remove my photo from my blog, and change my privacy settings on FB.

After a week, that blog post was buried on the second page and the RTs
stopped. Suddenly, I felt comforted by a false sense of anonymity again. Back
to my old habits, I guess... but perhaps with a temporarily heightened
cautiousness in what I share.

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Sidnicious
I loved The Lives of Others, enjoy photography and the smell of skunks, and
toy with technology as well. Am I going to wake up as a curly-haired artist
some day? That'd be interesting.

All that aside, this is a great article and I Want You to Want Me looks
awesome — technically and conceptually. Maybe it'll come to the browser some
time.

~~~
mattmaroon
The likelihood of that greatly depends on whether or not your hair is curly
now.

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cake
It's a very good essay about online privacy and our social relations in the
virtual world.

It's written by someone who understands it.

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kingsley_20
we don't nearly have as many of these kinds of posts on HN as I would enjoy
seeing.

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psyklic
Great essay, but I really, really wish the author had some guts and stopped
missing opportunities, both online and offline. Even when she finally got some
courage at the end, the result was (at best) "awkward."

~~~
jlees
that was one of the points of the essay, though. the intersection between
personal space and online, duology of self in a way, the artist as voyeur
behind a closed door. breaking those boundaries loses something. and y'know,
I'd have been way too scared to talk to him at the first coffee shop incident
too.

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wallflower
I saw a really good and somewhat disturbing play by Neil Labute called "The
Shape of Things" that you might find of interest to watch (it was made into a
movie) if you like this essay.

> In a modern version of Adam's seduction by Eve, The Shape of Things pits
> gentle, awkward, overweight Adam against experienced, analytical, amoral
> Evelyn, a graduate student in art...The Shape of Things challenges society's
> most deeply entrenched ideas about art, manipulation, and love.

<http://us.macmillan.com/theshapeofthings>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shape_of_Things>

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cousin_it
Great essay; love how the author walks in the shoes of both stalker and
stalked, emotionally explores every possible angle, reports back and leaves
the conclusion to us. It just went and changed my opinion about "researching"
specific people online. I will try to do it a lot less from now on.

