It has been a while since I tried deliberately to find out information about someone through almost exclusively online channels. I have been known to check out my old friends' new friends, girlfriends, and boyfriends on Facebook, from time to time, but it's usually only a cursory glance on account of the fact that these are not people I'm planning to pursue a relationship with, in the long-term. I look to see, to the extent that I can via a cursory glance, that they look like a decent human being, and then I stop: I trust my friends' judgement, and it's not like there's much I can do about it anyway when it's not my relationship. This reading came at a very good time for me, then, as I have just returned from a convention in Seattle where I met at least 50 new people, all of them from the same region and same fan community as myself, and most of whom I knew I would not see again in person for at least a year. Despite that, with the premise established that we were all gathered together over a mutual passion, and with a vested interest in being friendly with each other, a few of the new relationships I formed clearly held promise for lasting longer than one three-day weekend.
Some of these were relationships I plan to keep up and develop further in-person: certain of the folks I met hail from Portland and, as it turns out, meet weekly on Sundays in events I plan to attend as frequently as possible in the future now that I know they occur. There is something very special about the experience of meeting up with a fan community that you know and love online in-person, and it goes without saying to me that if I can extend that experience beyond one weekend, I will. The implications of that are worth looking at, but they're not all that relevant to a discussion of online information seeking... since I know I will be seeing them in person again soon, and since the meet-ups are in a safe public space (and I have already met them briefly in person, and they seem like normal people) I am not putting a lot of effort into finding information about them online first. But eliminating that group still leaves several folks who are residents of the general Pacific Northwest whom I met and whose company I enjoyed, but whom I am unlikely to see in person again soon. Given this circumstance, the next best thing I can do, it would seem, is to maintain the relationship online: first, by finding information about them.
It has only been two or three days since convention ended, but so far, my behavior has been consistent with Ramirez's predictions. Both now and in the past, when I join a new community, I tend to lurk a little bit and see what things are like before I attempt to join in or reply much. However, in this case, my goal is not to join an established forum community, it is to form relationships over a platform (tumblr) that is much more biased towards one-to-one communication, albiet in a public arena. It is with the goal of showing some who I met that I'm interested in actually continuing interaction that I choose interactive strategies to communicate with them: reblogging their posts, sending them asks, etc. Others who I met, who I didn't talk to as much but whom I admired greatly from my limited observation of them, I choose more passive strategies to observe (simply following them on tumblr or liking their fan page on Facebook) because my goal is not necessarily to be their friend so much as it is to keep up with what they are doing in the fan community under the assurance that I will probably enjoy it, since I admired/enjoyed what I saw of them at the convention so much. Of course, none of these relationships have existed for more than five days at this point, so it's not as if I'm terribly attached to any of them, and if I receive information that I assess as indicating that the person or persons in question are not as likable to me as they appeared to be after a limited interaction, it would be easy, given the brief amount of time since I met them and the limited channels through which we have interacted, to break off the relationship. But in the mean time, the background information I have (I know we share an interest, I know there's a possibility of us seeing each other again, and I know we already use the same online channel with some frequency since I have seen them post many times each day on tumblr), it seems easily worth it to continue to interact with them and observe them online.
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