How does it feel like when someone you don’t know instant messages you out of the blue? I’ve had this happen to me on a couple occasions, and I’ve just initiated one such moment. There are lots of emotional and reactive comparisons to be made with its various equivalents in different media. There’s a large sense of legitimacy involved, i.e. people justifying why you’re contacting them.
This isn’t so wholly different, mayhaps, from business calls. But I find that with Internet-based ones, there’s often a sense of reciprocity missing, which is one critique of electronic media that I’ve seen thrown a lot. IM has near-nothing. Mobile phones have call display. F2F has other faces.
So when I found myself IM-ing people randomly, the first thing I said tended to be a justification of the contact. Even after I did that though, I still feel bad, in some ways, that I possibly, probably, know more about the person I’m talking to than they do about me, because I’ve read their blog, or seen a profile, or snuck a peek at a profile picture. I always think, “Well, should I be telling them where they can find out more about me?” But I don’t feel terribly obligated to, unless they ask–which is something they have to verbalize now, the fact that they have no information to go on. Which is sometimes the case in the other media, but less often.
I could say I have personal experience with being randomly accosted online, but that would beg the question, would write on unix count as IMing?
