And 5 hours later

I am, admittedly, not big on phone calls. There is nothing wrong with them per se. I’m just the type of person where it never occurs to me to call people. The phone has become a functional object – an object for community maintenance rather than community formation. I talk with old friends occasionally, my boyfriend on a scheduled basis, and my family members as news occurs. Ideally the phone is a scheduling device to find out if we are still meeting for breakfast or to find out if someone wants to hang out on the weekend.

One of our members runs an event where the main character has disappeared. It is a mystery and I had to cause trouble. So when I saw my guildmate online I had to ping her to find out if I could add to the chaos. She did something that no one has done before (and I’ve IMed with lots of guildies), she asked to switch mediums to the phone because it was easier for her to talk than type. Five hours later, when both of our cordless phones started to beep we hung up.

So what the heck happened that led to our phones finally time out our conversation? We were long overdue for creating personal bonds. We’ve both been part of the same online community for many, many months but had never talked privately. Because of our online community we had shared experiences, common interests, common friends, and a common culture. We just had tons to talk about and the conversation just snowballed into a conversation that bisected the personal, public and online lives. I discovered that she had actually read my blog (could have knocked me over with a feather) and had misunderstood some of my comments. This just reaffirms my hatred for blogs (a rant for another time). The thing is it wasn’t until hour 4 in our conversation that my blog even came up, even though she had found it offensive.

It seems like the building of trust is both corporate and individual. Although we all tell of personal happenings on a daily basis it seems that we don’t always have the individual trust required to confront someone when something seems off. I find this to be an interesting truth that deserves more time for reflection and analysis.