Word: kollock
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Pretty easily, according to Peter Kollock, a UCLA professor of sociology who specializes in the Internet. Although cyberlove connotes images of computer geeks and aging spinsters, Kollock claims that digital dalliances follow in the grand literary tradition of Cyrano de Bergerac, Lord Byron and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. “Those people were truly in love,” he says of the letter-writers of bygone eras...
...Kollock cautions that e-mail can often be misleading. “No one stutters in text,” he explains. “You’ve got time. You can sit down and compose your response...
...Kollock assigns blame for Lillian’s romantic disappointment to the sequence of Internet relationships. “It’s very different from traditional relationships,” he says. “Normally, you see the person, pass a physical judgment, and then you decide whether or not to get to know them.” But online, Pollock says, “You get to know them first and eventually you swap pictures. People usually don’t get into relationships until they have a picture.” Though Lillian had received...
...marginalized groups like gay high school students, the Internet is often the only place to turn to find others like themselves, Kollock says. “The odds are that it would be easier to find them on the Internet. The search costs of seeking them out in real life would be too great.” For Adam, whose high school clique was, he says, unabashedly homophobic, the search cost would have been social humiliation...
While the Internet is vast, Kollock says that does not necessarily mean it is private. “In the past, what was talked about in discussion groups was unlikely to be seen,” he says. With the advent of Google and Yahoo, however, such privacy is no longer a guarantee. “Powerful search engines aggregate information and make it practical and discoverable,” he says. “In a sense, search engines have ended the formal boundaries that once existed in online communities...