Tonight, i figured out the significance of the cute (straight) woman who asked me to be her Friendster. Normally, i get Friendster requests from men who write me and then ask to be my Friendster (via message); i ignore them. Before you had to be connected to someone to ask to be their Friendster, i’d get requests from fake characters (like SARS). But this one stumped me. She was connected to my friends but i didn’t recognize her. She didn’t message me, just asked to be my Friendster outright. I messaged my friends to ask who she was, but they never responded. It all felt odd.
Well, it *is* odd. She isn’t real. She was the figment of my friends’ imagination… a hot girl they created to give them glowing testimonials and to suggest matches between them and other hot girls on the system (because it is less sketchy to have a hot girl tell a stranger that you should meet her friend than for the guy to just outright ask).
Of course, since they gave her sexual characteristics on her profile, she’s getting some of the most bizarre emails from people in her network – sexual fantasies, descriptions, etc. The guys who created her are dumbfounded.
It makes me wonder how many fake characters are out there really passing to be real. The lessons from MUD/MOO days are returning…. It makes me think of Van Gelder’s “The Strange Case of the Electronic Lover” where a male psychologist performed a disabled female woman online..