I Want You to Want Me

http://therumpus.net/2009/05/i-want-you-to-want-me/

by gabriel • 17 years ago

78 9 17 years ago

Sidnicious• 17 years ago

I loved The Lives of Others, enjoy photography and the smell of skunks, and toy with technology as well. Am I going to wake up as a curly-haired artist some day? That'd be interesting.

All that aside, this is a great article and I Want You to Want Me looks awesome — technically and conceptually. Maybe it'll come to the browser some time.

mattmaroon• 17 years ago

The likelihood of that greatly depends on whether or not your hair is curly now.

kingsley_20• 17 years ago

we don't nearly have as many of these kinds of posts on HN as I would enjoy seeing.

wannabetechgeek• 17 years ago

This was a beautiful written and very compelling essay. I enjoyed every word of it and thank HN for sharing this with its readers.

I recently experienced a little dust-up online, where a blogger posted my Tweets and Twitter profile in order to retaliate against me (long story). I wanted to crawl into a hole and disappear - shut down my Twitter account, remove my photo from my blog, and change my privacy settings on FB.

After a week, that blog post was buried on the second page and the RTs stopped. Suddenly, I felt comforted by a false sense of anonymity again. Back to my old habits, I guess... but perhaps with a temporarily heightened cautiousness in what I share.

psyklic• 17 years ago

Great essay, but I really, really wish the author had some guts and stopped missing opportunities, both online and offline. Even when she finally got some courage at the end, the result was (at best) "awkward."

jlees• 17 years ago

that was one of the points of the essay, though. the intersection between personal space and online, duology of self in a way, the artist as voyeur behind a closed door. breaking those boundaries loses something. and y'know, I'd have been way too scared to talk to him at the first coffee shop incident too.

cake• 17 years ago

It's a very good essay about online privacy and our social relations in the virtual world.

It's written by someone who understands it.

wallflower• 17 years ago

I saw a really good and somewhat disturbing play by Neil Labute called "The Shape of Things" that you might find of interest to watch (it was made into a movie) if you like this essay.

> In a modern version of Adam's seduction by Eve, The Shape of Things pits gentle, awkward, overweight Adam against experienced, analytical, amoral Evelyn, a graduate student in art...The Shape of Things challenges society's most deeply entrenched ideas about art, manipulation, and love.

http://us.macmillan.com/theshapeofthings

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shape_of_Things

cousin_it• 17 years ago

Great essay; love how the author walks in the shoes of both stalker and stalked, emotionally explores every possible angle, reports back and leaves the conclusion to us. It just went and changed my opinion about "researching" specific people online. I will try to do it a lot less from now on.

I Want You to Want Me

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