I ran across this video piece from mobuzz.tv while running around the nets this morning. It seemed particularly salient given all of the research I have been doing on anonymous online behavior on craigslist’s Missed Connections (here, here and here).

The content we generate on the internet always has a context, even if we are attempting to distance ourselves from those contexts. As this newscast illustrates, it seems we are all still unsure about how to negotiate our relationship with internet “anonymity.”

On the lighter side, check out Craigslist Curmudgeon, a blog that extends shaming beyond the confines of craigslist by featuring some of the more rediculous posts.

The title kind of says it all.

I am in NYC for the weekend, and while waiting for the arrival of a friend I sat down on a convenient pair of benches in SoHo (here featured by our own Steve Frost). Apparently TimeOut magazine has deemed these benches as one of the gay hipster hot spots for the year. My being there, however, was a complete accident – I can only hope some of that big appley hipster-ish-ness rubbed off.

That said, these benches are in front of an American Apparel. Go figure. This last semester amid queer theory and authors including Butler and Halberstam, we began saying “Even queers aren’t queer anymore.”

I kind of thought that hipsters might have become the new queers. Maybe that’s only true if you are straight.

Each time I finished showing my video, and the first question I was always was “How did you do the posts?”

“Oh, I just posted them to the website,” was my casual and rehearsed reply. The posts they are referring were those posted to craigslist’s Missed Connection section, quoting the various theorists that I included as a means for driving the narrative. Yes, the posts were actually there (Washington D.C., m4m), always accompanied with a little message low enough on the screen to be kept out of the shot, apologizing for the off topic nature of the post.

The next question I would get was one for which I had no rehearsed response: “Did anyone respond?”

The first time I was asked this I just laughed. “No, no one replied,” I said simply. Why would they? The content I was posting was not even close to a missed connection. In fact, craigslist users flagged and removed all of them within a few short hours. Except, what I said wasn’t true. When I finally did get back to the junk email account I used for this project, I found two unexpected responses that made me stop and rethink my argument.

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The semester is wrapping up, which means the last few weeks have produced an insane amount of academic product. I hope that some of it will end up here, but first I have to add some spit and polish. But here is one that seems ready.

For my Gender, Sexuality and the Body seminar, I created what Dr. Coventry calls a “Digital Storytelling Project.” I call it “One of the hardest finals I have ever had.” A Storytelling Project is basically a theoretical argument made in video format. In one vein of my semester’s worth of research on anonymous online behavior, I was looking at peer-to-peer regulation across digital and real world spaces, and in particular, public responses in the Missed Connections section of craigslist (A follow up of sort to some previous research).

Video after the jump. (more…)