I am mostly concerned with the stalker aspect of people looking at my picks to see who is special to me…

There are special people I am close to in SL who well deserve all the kudos and recognition I could ever give them, but I don’t feel that a ‘top friends’ style public list is the way to go.

I’ve seen too much picks drama as well. Bleh.

Even though I of course ended up dropping that little piece of insanity, the concern over letting people know how much they genuinely matter to me – and in turn my wanting to know that they genuinely can be trusted and are worth the amount of time and emotion I invest in them because they feel the same – remains.

After you’ve been betrayed by a few too many friends that you thought you could trust, it’s only human to seek ways to protect yourself from it happening again. When you’re young, simple lists or titles (“this is my BFF”) are a straight-forward way to achieve this. As you get older it becomes more complicated (doesn’t everything), and we seek other objective public declarations. We seek titles of husband and wife, that publically state this person loves me and only me. We make people our “best man” at our weddings as a statement of “this is the one person I most trust and want by my side”. And if we carried with us all in real life the ability to right-click each other to check who we honestly treasure through public declarations, we’d no doubt use that too. The ring on my finger is a very conscious constant public statement that one person is my lover, and I’m not on the market for anyone else – I suppose that sort of thing is a real world statement like a declaration of love in a profile pick.

In Second Life you actually get the picks though, so it’s completely natural that people use them like that. Even more so in a world where faking friendship is extremely easy to do – people can’t read your face or body language to get the cues we usually use in the real world to figure out genuine emotion. People regularly use IMs to diss people they are treating as friends in open chat – it’s cruel but it happens a lot. So picks provide what seems like an objective statement that you really do care.

So two things happen when someone comes off your profile picks: (1) the message is sent that you don’t genuinely care anymore, (2) the person suffers the humiliation of you publically admitting they don’t matter anymore to you. Then we go back to primary school where the mentality sets in of “you took me off your list, so I’m taking you off mine”. Round and round we go. It happens in Facebook too with best friend applications – if you’re left off someone else’s you wonder why you included them in yours.

It’s such a natural thing to seek reassurance that friends really are friends – we trust them with so much of ourselves and we’ve all been burnt before. Even more understandable that we seek that reassurance in the virtual world for the reasons I gave above. But the same way we grow out of making lists in primary school, people eventually realise the same about virtual world lists (one hopes), and those who don’t will suffer the same pointless drama we experience as kiddies.

At the end of the day there is no easy way to prove a friendship, except through time and experiences together where you make yourself vulnerable and the other person doesn’t take advantage of it. My neighbours down the road refuse to get married even though they’ve been together for decades and have 3 kids, they say the title of marriage causes a lot of problems for people and they’re happy without needing the public declaration – what matters is how they feel and how they treat each other. Maybe they’re right aye?

Sorry for the long reply, this is what happens when I stop running my own blog, I end up accidentally doing blog length replies on others now and then :p

What I find fascinating (in a train wreck kind of way) is when people use pics to attack other people or to air personal dirty laundry. Then the other party uses their profile to respond. Its the picks equivalent of blog wars — profile drama! Only in Second Life…………….