Monday, February 14, 2011

My Underwhelming Euphoria and The Advent of Cyberempathy

Last week has been exciting, just as it should be. The office was recovering from the first half of the Chinese New Year lull and we had a few good rounds of Texas Hold'em Poker. I broke even, after all those bouts of raising and folding.

What was more exciting was my adoption of a smartphone! It's a Blackberry Curve 8520, and belonged to the deputy head of the department. It's not the highest end model, and it lacks 3G and GPS, but that's fine with me. 3G is overrated for now as there isn't much heavy duty bandwidth I require for now and GPS was instantly solved with Google Maps. So that makes the rest of the phone's functions more than adequate for my desires. Did I mention it was gratis? Oh, yes it is! Well, in the sense that I didn't have to fork out any cash for the phone. My part of this bargain was to enter into a mobile plan contract with DiGi to get the phone at a cheaper price for said deputy head (The hunt for the model he wanted deserves an ENTIRE POST ON ITS OWN. hrmph). So I would get his phone for free and he would pay for the newer model. I would be bound by the contract for 2 years and I figured that if I wanted, I could just sell the Curve and get another model, so this would work like a rebate. A depreciating one at that, but hey, in the meantime, I get to pop my smartphone cherry!

Enter day 1 of mobile broadband goodness...ok scratch that, make it day 2, cuz Blackberry and DiGi were completely not talking to each other, at least for my account, so I got stuck with Wi-Fi on day 1. Come day 2, I got most of the much needed applications installed via wi-fi, and was raring to go try em all out. First off, I overestimated the number of Blackberry users out there. Only 6 people were in my Blackberry Messenger list. That makes a sad BBM user out of me. But I brushed it aside, as the BBM's purpose was fulfilled. 5 out of 6 were from my office, whom swear on the BBM's group chat, and till this day (4 days and counting) had not send a word through the group chat. Let me just highlight that this was the main reason for me getting the blackberry.

The second reason, was push email. Yes, it has been around for more than a decade but I was always a late bloomer anyway. This was made the second reason because I can do push on any other smartphone model, and I initially wanted the iPhone 4. So on I went entering the server details etc and voila! E-mail on my phone is alive! I had....0 new mails. Of course, this was understandable as it was (it still is as I write this) the Chinese New Year holidays but I'm a smartphone virgin here! You can't expect me to keep that in mind while I'm ravishing my boss's sloppy seconds like a horny puppy in a sea of bitches in heat!

Ok, work aside, all there is left for the phone to do is social networking. The staples came in and worked like wonders. I couldn't keep my fingers off the device as I scrolled up and down through the apps for various opportunities for me to contribute to the negavortex of tweets, likes and comments. About 10 minutes into this frenzy I worked myself into, I had to look up to stretch my neck. Once I did, I just stared blankly ahead for a while. Then I put the Blackberry aside, lifted my hands forward, and started typing and clicking with my desktop. The negavortex turned into a little twister passing by as I whizzed my virtual hand through it and watched it dissipate into endless cyberspace. By now, you must realise that I had, all this while, been sitting right in front of my PC and communicating with the Blackberry.

Did I finally get to experience the Blackberry at it's best? I did, on day 3, when I was actually on the go. Safe to say, it was one of the most underwhelming experiences I've had, and I had all that anticipated euphoria made up in my mind.

On a separate note, I noticed that people have and always been deducing emotions from chat text. Like, on a Facebook status, someone posted a shoutout on some local tragedy (think freak death) and these 2 people, X and Y responded with the proverbial LOL. A third and fourth person came into the conversation subsequently, one chiming in with X with another LOL and another condemning Y for being so insensitive. Weird, but can people actually perceive a person's intentions just via text? It makes sense to then deduce that such perception is based on the text source's character, or just your impression of that character. Then, you build impressions and form real emotional responses to and from the text.

It's really weird, because today, I got wished a few Happy Valentine's Day from friends. Some wishes I genuinely felt happy for, and others... well, there's just no polite way to put it, is there? Still, I want to describe this feeling as accurately as I can. So here goes: You know when you're friends with some people and others get acquainted along the way, and you somehow get entwined in their social circle and sometimes make interaction out of obligation to the common friend that you share? After that, some of these acquaintances may come up and offer what is seemingly a genuine greeting and well wishes to you, but you can't seem to shake the annoying feeling that you don't really want to interact but you still do anyway because, you know, you're nice? So you reciprocate what feels like awkward conversation for you but YOU feel like they're getting a genuine experience out of it, during which point you're just finding some excuse to leave politely and hopefully not interact with the acquaintance again. It feels like that, and it feels like crap. Because you're not doing a nice thing, yet you're not really getting anything out of it other than leaving a favourable impression on the counterparty.

Describing the above makes the whole thing sound like patronising, but with some form of finesse. I think people do a lot of it in the virtual world nowadays. Sometimes, I feel like I'm at the receiving end, even though it's in text. And it sucks, because it may be me making it up in me head, and talking about it may jeopardise matters further, so I can't confirm it, and I don't like to be left wondering like that. It doesn't help that I'm a bit thick when it comes to these matters. But in the end, I can't really help it, so to hell with it all. They're not gonna rain on my parade.

How powerful are your cyberempathy skills? This wrong mind constantly wonders....