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.

This piece was surprisingly artistic once I got beyond the stress of creating it. At the simplest level, I was recreating Missed Connections from trivial video footage. A brief glance through an invisible barrier (glass) was enough to create the illusion of a mediated connection between two people. Extend those momentary glances and then hook the footage up to missed connection posts and the piece spoke for itself. But it was also a theoretical piece, and one interpretation might be that people looking for connections start to see them where they might not exist.

Another interpretation might be that participation in the culture of missed connections creates a feedback loop in which missed connections may outshone by the creation and (re)inforcement of cultural rules. In fact, over the last couple of weeks, a number of posts have taken advantage of the anonymous nature of craigslist to deride an apparently well known member of the local gay community. All of this left me wondering if the anonymity of craiglist was more important than the Missed Connections. And if the missed connections are no longer important, then what prevents this space from emulating other digital spaces? Will the evolution of craigslist Missed Connections include a loss of it’s uniqueness?

Imagine my surprise when I found the first response to Foucault’s quote from Society must be Defended:

That is a somewhat obscure text of his. I’ve not encountered many who are familiar with it.

I am 23 year old Ph.D. stud. at UMD. 6’2″ 150lbs in the gym most days.

Care to chat sometime?

Or this one in response to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish:

like ur post…interested in servicing you

(The subject line asked “are u dominant?”)

Here were two emails in response to what was more or less white noise, not a missed connection in sight. So what prevents Missed Connections from emulating other spaces? Apparently nothing. I am just left wondering then, why does the context of the gay community and Washington D.C. still drive the content in this section of craigslist?