It feels like a Sunday on Tribe

Maybe it's me or maybe it's my choices of tribes but I don't seem to have a lot to say these days. I have a feeling these things move in cycles but I've been waiting for awhile to get swept up in the kind of discussion that makes you think, yes I must log on today to see what everyone said...

I haven't had that feeling in ages, actually, it seems like it hasn't been since they changed the design. It must be a coincidence because I don't think the new design has anything to do with it, how could it? It's the content I'm here for after all. But 'tribing; is all a bit random for me these days so that if you leave it a few days without logging in, posts you might have been interested in go stale and you can't be asked to comment on something where you kind of 'had to be there' for the moment when it was still live. But you weren't. Maybe that's what's wrong with my connection to tribe now. It's too sparse.

But it's more than just dull when you don't really engage, I also have a sense that it's not worth putting in a lot of time unless it's strictly for Eliza-style, self therapy. Quick comments to keep a conversational ball up are fine but really going for it seems like a waste of energy when people just come and go so easily. Sometimes permanently, like the weird experience of reading one of my friend's tragic suicide note last autumn. It read like he was out of his mind with despair over what seemed a small, sad misunderstanding but had obviously pushed him over a terrible edge. I wrote a message back of course, as did a couple of other people, but he never replied to me and his profile just stayed there relentlessly static for a few weeks until one day when I logged on he had totally disappeared. I Googled to see if I could track him down somewhere, sometimes people keep their tag names, and I did find him on another site which revealed a whole other side to his character that he had kept quiet on tribe, with good reason. He seemed to have stopped posting there too. So either he is truly dead or he has reinvented himself and is happily posting under a new name somewhere else. I prefer to believe the latter case of course but there's no way to know. As far as I know my friend is just gone.

I find it unsettling when people write me messages, like they really want to get to know me cos we've found we have stuff in common but I don't respond (because I've not logged in) and then they just leave tribe, again without a good-bye and you're left thinking - was it something I didn't say?

Is swinging cool or sad?

I only bring this up because people keep mentioning it to me. Like BDSM being the new jazz, I think saying you swing means you're a 21st-century sexual player. So why does the idea of it confuse me so much? It could be the image I have of Louis Theroux's TV shows here, where he goes to somewhere in America and meets a whole clan of swingers and tries to understand what it's all about. But of course he picks a group of people who seem to be all terribly old or overweight and their "parties" take place in seedy environments where millions of them grope and writhe together in dark rooms. He bottles out, can't join in, though for a brief moment he seems tempted. Like he wishes he was that free. Perhaps it's the fact they are all smiling so insanely all through the programme. Wouldn't you be smiling if you could shag anyone you wanted even into your 60s but keep all your home comforts?

So Louis Theroux is what I think about when I hear the word "swingers". Even the word sounds twee, it annoys me. Like people are swinging themselves around in a dance where they change partners every few minutes and find themselves having to sleep with the next guy in line, doesn't matter if he's the elephant man, hey, he's part of the swinging team. He's deeply unattractive but he's ours! And it's your turn.

I think I'm being irrational about this. It must be sexual jealousy of some sort. If I have to work so hard to keep my going relationship together then why should you swingers be able to have your cake and eat it. Maybe I think it's tacky because it's not fair on all the rest of us who remain in sexless marriages because it's the proper thing to do. If I can control my sexual urges then I must be a more upstanding member of society than those swingers are. Isn't that what so-called family-values are really all about?

Except I'm not in a sexless marriage, in fact I'm not in any real marriage at all. I'm not even in a real, commited relationship of any kind and I always have plenty of guys around. I'm not shy and know I'm not inhibited. So what's my problem? I should be slapping the term on my own profile with gusto.

Unfortunately, I just don't really know why I can't say I swing. I think it might be because I've not met anyone that I really wanted to have home comforts with so I've never had to grapple with that *problem* of what to do if you don't want to jettison your main squeeze but you're really hot for someone else. I would like to think that when I meet that person, yes I suppose you'd call it "the one", that I will care enough about them that I wouldn't want to mess with the psychological labyrinth that swinging sets you and your partner down into. No matter how much you trust you have, the risk is serious that the other person will start spending large parts of their days thinking about someone else. I know I could so easily get lost in those dark alleys and by the time I'd found my way back to my partner we would have both forgotten what our relationship was all about.

This idea that swinging is only for those who are essentially bored of their relationship but financially decide it's best to stay there is what I want to believe in. On the other hand when I get to 60 and I realise that life is for the living and I haven't cared for a very long time whether my bum looks fat in any sort of trousers whatsoever and my guy starts going to bed at 7pm then, just maybe, I'll forget about the dignity of growing old gracefully and I put it to my guy and suggest it as a night out, perhaps.

Bombs in London today

Today was the worst terrorist attack this capital has ever seen, so said the BBC when I turned on the telly when I got home from work. I'm sure it's true but I haven't had time to think about it yet. No one here is talking about it but I imagine it's because they have, like me, been on the phone all evening reassuring people all over the world that we are still alive. Or maybe it's that they are so blase about it that it's hardly worth mentioning? I don't actually know.

I should tell the story from the beginning so you all might know what it was like to be here on the ground. This morning just before I left for work my mother, who's visiting me from France, called out that there was something on the telly about a power surge or something at Liverpool St. I scoffed at this and said - what does that mean "power surge"? She said they hadn't said very much about it but it didn't sound like a big deal. I laughed and said, "well so long as they're not saying it's a bomb or anything!" She laughed at this too, it seemed so unlikely, especially after the excitement of the Olympics announcement yesterday.

My first bus took longer than usual to come and it was very crowded, I barely squeezed myself on it. Got down to Hackney Central, sardines style and transferred to a 48 which would take me down to Shoreditch, just north of Liverpool St station. There seemed to be some congestion in the front of the bus with people wanting to get to places like London Bridge and the driver was asked whether it was far from where she was going. She just looked at the guy who had asked that question like he was crazy - "It's really far," is what she said. He cursed and got off. Whilst sitting there sweating in my long sleeved jumper AND rain coat on the upper deck of the double decker (despite it being July) I tuned in to a phone conversation in the front seat. Two actually. One was a guy chatting about the power surge thing and the woman next to him was talking excitedly in Spanish about a "happening" in Russell Square. My Spanish isn't great but I started listening even more when an Italian woman leaned across the opposite seat and asked this woman in Spanish what was going on. Again, all I could make out was that something had happened in Russell Square but I didn't know what. I still didn't make the connection with the power surge or that any of this could have anything to do with bombs.

Had to change busses when we stopped for ages and a guy came upstairs and said no busses are going to central London and this one is only going for a couple more stops so get on the one behind this one if you want to go to Shoreditch. So I did; it was even more packed than the first bus I had been on. Got off early because it was so unpleasant, the insides of the windows of the bus were all steamed. I felt clammy.

"Bet you haven't heard!" they said when I finally got in to the studio. "What?" I asked, I still had no idea. "There have been bombs going off all over London," they told me. Oh my god, was all I could think as we struggled to get the radio to go on. Nobody could do it, we always listen to CDs. Finally someone suggested AM and we got something. My business partner's wife kept ringing to see whether he had arrived yet. We did some calculations and realised that he might have been at Edgware Road just as the bomb went off. We pondered this for a moment and then tried to ring him on his mobile again. Mobiles weren't working though, too much traffic. Just as we were getting ourselves worked up into a panic, he walked in the door. He had been ejected from the tube at Euston (one stop away from Kings Cross) and had walked down in a mass of people - he said it was shoulder to shoulder - to where the bus had exploded. He said it was split completely open and the top had blown completely off, debris everywhere. We had clients at Aldgate tube so we got in touch with them to check they were OK first. The phone starting ringing and didn't stop all day. People from all over the UK and abroad rang us, texted us, emailled us to find out if we were OK because they knew we were so close to Liverpool Street. So many of our ex-staff got in touch to check we were all OK. It was heartening in the face of horror.

Britons have a long history of dealing with terrorism so it didn't affect us as deeply as 9/11 did. For some reason the sheer evil audacity of that display seemed like a new depth for humanity to plunge to. This was more like what we grew up with. I experienced most of my bomb scares when I was a kid spending my summers in Dublin. There were days we could not go into town. Later in London when I first moved here in 1990 we had bomb scares with depressing regularity but you never felt that the IRA wanted to specifically murder loads of people. Or at least, I, being half Irish, didn't feel that way. They were supposed to phone up to alert the authorities before so there would be time to evacuate, that was the supposed deal. It tired us out, made us blase and finally bored us. Unless we had relatives who were involved of course, in that case I'm sure the only outcome would have been complete devastation.

So today we feel a mixture of things. A great sense of solidarity with loved ones as we connected with so many, relief that we now know what they had planned and it's over now, euphoria at surviving, but also anger because people actually died and the extremists showed pure evil at wanting to waste human lives simply for show - because they could in some sick power move. I don't know anyone connected to anyone who died but the great irony is they were probably anti the war as were the British people generally. I also hate to see the Muslim community even further polarised from the rest of us but that is, after all, part of what the extremists want. We must fight this spread of hatred. I imagine the Muslims in London will feel a greater sense of fear than the rest of us post this event. But we won't give in to the fear thing because we have seen how it can be used by a government to manipulate policy and budgets. We're too smart for that one, I hope.

I don't want more money spent on weapons and all that big gun macho posturing but if I had a piggy bank with MI5 written on it I'd stick a bill or two in it tonight. Infiltration seems the only way to fight those who have lost everything, from their self-regard to their humanity.

Virtual lust

My first sense of how exciting meeting people online could be must have been about 6 years ago. It was a Friday night, late when I was hanging in our studio and decided to check out some new site I'd heard of where you set up some avatar and then move it around in chat rooms. My business partner was still there, few beers. After I managed to sort myself out and appear in a chat room some guy avatar approached and suggested we go into a private room. I laughed and yelled to my business partner to come over to check this out. He thought it was hilarious and said GO! GO! so I did and then I just couldn't deal with it - it was too weird. He had to do the keyboard thing. It read like a classic porn movie. You can imagine the dialogue. It was silly but I could see it could be a turn on. Somehow it was also a turn on because the other guy didn't know what we were doing our end. And that he'd just had virtual sex with a man. Kind of.

About six months later I decided OK, be yourself, try it out, see what happens. So I did and spent a year moving around a cycle of meeting someone, chattin on the phone and then meeting up IRL. The first person I ever met turned into a very close friend still, though most of how we communicate is still online. He knows more about what's really going on in my head than almost anyone. Virtual lust almost ruined it because by the time we met there was nothing for it except to go all the way, immediately and completely. That build up seemed to eclipse all else and we talked in parallel with our minds on just one thing. I liked that episode and though we had to take a break from each other to let it cool into a friendship, it made me want more.

Everyone wanted to flirt, like crazy, on IM and texting. All day and every day. I found myself halfway towards phone sex without knowing how that had started. I didn't actually get very far with most but flirted stupidly with almost all of them. There was something about the online way of meeting people that made that happen. Then I met a guy who I liked too much. We didn't do much email but spent hours on the phone and flirted on IM all day. Somehow it got to me and I realise I was in too deep. Fortunately he took off to the other side of the world but not before he broke my heart. I just didn't know why because I had only met him a few times.

After that I had to back away from it and when the first offline, sane and normal guy looked twice my way I jumped at him. Save me from this weirdness I thought. He did but only for a short while. God, normal can be so boring.

Now I think that virtual infatuation thing can still be cool but it's just too damn easy. It's dangerous because before you realise it you aren't having a thing with another person, it's just the fix you need. The next email, the next text, the next IM chat... Virtual lust makes you blind.

I am not me

The trouble with starting a blog is that it like having a child, you can't get rid of it. I'm actually a diary writer, always have been. I have diaries that catalogue doomed romances from the age of about 16. Black doodles, left-handed scrawl, right-handed italics, the odd image from a magazine, the contents have changed vastly over the years but the outside is always the same. Black book, unlined pages, heavy leaf.

At about the age of 18 I slipped into poetry and wrote desperate and dark verse for about two years. That was what I had inside and it found that place to come out. Better there than on the outside, I suppose. Later, as I grew up, my diaries became less yearning, less disillusioned, more factual. I did this, I did that. It might have evolved into a deathly dull read but two things saved me. After a very old aunt died I was in her cottage in Ireland and saw a little book, it looked like an address book. I picked it up and realised it was her diary, of sorts. The entries were dead simple: went to mass, saw Kathleen, bought skirt... Whenever I'm tempted to abridge, abbreviate, procrastinate I always remember just where that road might take me. The second thing was a gift from my mother. She was a diarist as well and she told me early, remember to describe your people well because the details about how they were and what they looked like are what you will forget. I always try to get that right.

My book lives by my bed and I consider it as a kind of dumping ground that nobody should read but me. I don't care about the language that I write in. I write drunk, sad, mad, in despair and often these entries are embarassing to revisit. I wonder at how deranged I sound when I'm calmly checking out what I happened to be doing this time last year. "God, I thought I was more sophisticated than that," I think. "Less childish at the very least..." I wonder at the fact that since the date of that entry two friends have died and that book shows that I spent two months over that period writing dreary monologues about how some guy I can't even remember was giving me the hot and cold treatment. The book perhaps should be burned it occurs to me.

I thought a blog would be the same but it's not. It bothers me when I don't write. If I don't have anything to say I still think I should write. Just for the sake of clocking in, doing the thing. My diary just sits passively by my bed and never asks to be written in. When I had my kid I left it for four years and then went back to it as nonchalantly as I had put it aside. No pressure, I'm just doing this because it's what I do to keep my mates shielded from the broken record that sometimes really is going around and around in my head. The last thing I want to do is put that kind of thing in a blog so everyone can see.

Blogs are different. They aren't diaries because there is an implied audience. That audience means you rise to its expectations. Perhaps that means you present who you want to be more than who you really are.

top 25 people to watch

One of my tribes was celebrating the inclusion of local people in the recent top 25 people list. I looked at their profiles and thought, yes these are very sussed looking profiles. These people have not only put their personal lives online but also their professional personas. Because quite a few didn't have too many friends I wondered why they were on the top 25 then I realised that it was about the PROFILES rather than the people.

Then I felt like a lab rat and started wondering whether it was us driving the evolution of the software by discovering new ways of relating or whether the software was pulling all the shots, big brother style. I'd like to prefer it's the former but I suspect it's a bit of both.

Unexpected girl's bottom

I was telling a mate of mine tonight about tribe and how interesting it is. The social software intellectuals tribe was particularly relevant to what we were discussing. She's a real professional but is always up for having a go on new ideas in the online world. She said, "oh yes let me take a moment now to take a look". Seconds later there was a sort of a silence and then a very loud "omg that's awful!". What? What? I was saying back to her as she repeated "that's so awful". She then sent me the link and said "look at the top newest tribe". And there amonst a whole load of innocuous screen real estate was a pretty serious close up of true gynecological glory. I said, "Oh yeah, I forgot to mention... tribe has another side."

I don't think she'll be back.

What are friends all about?

I have come to terms with my new profile but still need to dream up some more types of elements to put on it. I have a feeling these will come. In the meantime I have customised it somewhat and taken some of the emphasis off the personal details and put it more on the posts and the photo. I hadn't expected to be so interested in seeing others' photos and putting up a sort of personal scrapbook. We'll see how I do.

Today I wanted to write a quick post about tribe friends. This week two interesting things happened to me. The first was that I finally managed, after some deliberation it has to be said, to invite my first "friend" to join my network. I felt that instead of simply waiting for people to make me their friend, that it would be good to actually invite some people who I felt were like-minded. It's not quite so simple as all that, I quickly discovered, because this person declined my invite on the grounds that it would create more spam-like listing junk on her homepage. I hadn't even considered this and suddenly what had seemed like a sort of benign, feel-good gesture appeared to be, in fact, much more insidious. This behaviour which is driven by the tribe application now seems worryingly like the means by which the ad messages are programmed.

I was somewhat crushed by the whole experience until, fortunately, a couple more people invited me to be their friends for what I could see were the benign reasons AND the second person I had invited to be a friend myself accepted. Apparently he was less concerned about the big brother ad stuff than the first girl. On balance now, I've actually checked out what kind of banners and listing stuff actually does appear on the screen and I now feel that it's actually not that intrusive. In fact, I am such a webhead that I don't even see any of that irrelvant stuff on the screen anymore. So though I may pause before inviting anyone else to be my "friend", I don't think I will condemn the concept as simply advertisting-driven completely. Yet.

The second interesting "friend" related thing that happened this week was that I received a mail from a guy who had only joined tribe the day before but already had over 60 friends. His friend invitation to me was bizarre, something in the way of "hey you're cute, let's be friends". Now that on it's own isn't particularly unusual but his tribes were cartoonly uncool and he hadn't posted anything to any of them. So I answered his invitation with a message rather than simply accepting. He never answered. I think he was a complete fabrication, a sort of tribe experiment. If you send out 100 friend invites to 100 girls you fancy, and you almost go out of your way to present yourself in your worst possible light, how many will say yeah ok I'll be your friend? It seems the answer is "quite a few actually"! Go figure.

First day on the new style profile

There isn't a lot happening on my tribes today and it's one of those days where I don't feel up to starting a topic off. Instead I thought I'd put the last bit of energy I have left into getting this blog off the ground.

I have been intending to start a blog for some time but have been worried about having the stamina to actually write something interesting every day about a given topic. I'm very interested in social software and online communities so this blog will have to be about that. I already write a diary in a black book with heavy art paper in it. I even have a quill pen and my daily woes and joys will stay mercifully buried there for some time, no doubt. Here is where I want to talk about the passion that I have for spending a part of my life interacting with people online. I'm such a social person and have loads of friends offline, I don't quite know why this online thing is so interesting to me. No doubt I will figure it out as I live it.