Narrator: It’s called a changeover. The movie goes on, and nobody in the audience has any idea.

Narrator: You wake up at Seatac, SFO, LAX. You wake up at O’Hare, Dallas-Fort Worth, BWI. Pacific, mountain, central. Lose an hour, gain an hour. This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time. You wake up at Air Harbor International. If you wake up at a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?

@BillCammack > @DatingGenius > @InfamousVillain …

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I’ve been transparent on the net since 2006, almost three years ago. In that time, I’ve gotten extremely used to people knowing SOMETHING about me before they meet me. Some people know that I edit. Some people know that I hang out with a lot of chicks. Some people know I’m into Social Media, etc etc…

In December ’07, I wrote “Are You A Tech Elitist”, and in April ’08 I wrote “Digital Internet Snobbery”. The basic point of the two was that as I was moving forward with better Social Media sites, I was losing track of people that never moved ahead. This was fine with me, because I needed to interact with the progressive people in order to remain progressive.

Eventually, I realized that the people I was interacting with wasn’t a function of friendship, but a function of “who was it that made it to the next tech level?” Are you in AOL rooms? Me too. Are you on AIM? Me too. Are you on MySpace? Me too. Are you on Facebook? Me too. Are you on ooVoo? Me too. Are you on Twitter? Me too. They’re all a bunch of divisions, and being that there are so many hours in the day, the lesser formats of interaction and socialization are left in the dust. It’s necessary, because only the people on THIS level are going to find out first about the NEXT LEVEL and become “early adopters” and most likely the Heroes and Rockstars of the near future (as far as our fisbowl / echo chamber’s concerned).

After I wrote those, I stopped reaching forward towards people and started looking back. Recently, I found friends from former jobs I held (when I used to 9-5, back in the day). I found friends from MIT that I had lost touch with. I found friends from High School and friends I grew up with, so I decided to see if I could find anyone from Elementary. :) This is what led to this post.

I had a very interesting experience this morning. I had sent a friends request to someone I knew in Elementary School. In ABSOLUTE hindsight, my “Digital Internet Snobbery” disallowed me from introducing myself properly. I asked the person who THEY were, instead of explaining who *I* was, because I’m so used to people already KNOWING who I am. People recognize me walking down the street. People recognize me at social functions. People recognize me on the internet (unless I’m wearing makeup… )

So, basically, my current Delusions of Grandeur plus years of being in the echo chamber transparency spotlight plus decades of being a superstar IRL combined to disallow myself to believe that I wasn’t making an indelible mark on people’s memories (*gasp* I almost spelled mammaries!… “Making an indelible mark on people’s mammaries!” :O no no no….. Anyway…) at that point in time.

So I FAILED to identify myself properly, and the response I got was [paraphasing] “Did you go to that school? I only add friends, and I don’t remember you, and neither does [ANOTHER one crony of mine from back in the day]“. So now, not only doesn’t person A remember me, but neither does person B, which implies that it’s possible that persons C through Z don’t either! :D There’s nothing wrong with this, but it made me consider whom I remember from that far back, and why.

I’ve always gone to specialized schools that you had to take tests to get into, so EVERYBODY was always SOMEBODY, to a degree. Yes, I’m talking about Elementary School, haha we’re from New York City, and people have to develop their social personalities very early on. Even in specialized environments, there are cliques. You have the rich kids, the cool kids, the athletes, the kids that all live in a certain area, the kids that all listen to a certain type of music, the kids that dress well, the popular kids, the unpopular kids…

Granted, there are lots of people that I remember by name and not by face. There are lots of people I don’t remember at all. I’m not claiming to remember everybody. Still, it’s an interesting feeling for me to NOT be remembered by somebody. :)

My memory happens to be visual, which is why I’m good as a video editor. I only have a few instances, but I have clear visual memories of both person A *AND* person B. It’s funny how living with those visions gives a false sense of closeness… which clouds the actual detachment of not being in contact with someone for years and years….

So I sent my reply back, citing mutual friends, etc, however, by the time I was writing it, I realized I wasn’t writing to my Elementary School friend, but to an entirely different person that’s had an entire lifetime’s worth of experiences since then. Basically, I couldn’t actually say “This is your friend…” in any format of present-day way, because we’ve been completely out of touch since we were in school together.

That was a sobering recognition, to say the least. I made sure to put in the note that I understood if they didn’t consider me a “friend” at this point. I’m sure there’s some sort of statute of limitations on friendship, hahaha :D

So the response to that will either be positive, negative or neutral / no reply at all. Either result, I’m cool with. I realize now that you can’t just pick up where you left off. You can’t just say “HERE I AM!!! IT’S MEEE!!! :)” and have people go “Oh yeah… good to see you… welcome!”. That was THEN, and This is NOW. If you’re going to reach back to people from back in the day, then REGARDLESS of how entertaining you think you are IRL or on the internet, MAKE SURE that you present them with your current “friendship resume” so they can make an educated decision about whether they’re willing to try you out AGAIN as a friend or just let the past be the past…..

~Bill Cammack

Twitter: BillCammack
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I’ve had some really interesting experiences as of late, which all revolve around the question “Who Are You?”. Not the absolutely unknowing question, as in “Who IS that over there?”, but the arrogant question “Who are YOU?”.

Let’s get it straight off the bat. “Who you are” is relative and completely subjective.

Am I an Emmy Award-Winning video editor? Yes I am. Have I been a National *and* International Emmy Awards Judge for several years? Yes I have. Does that have *ANYTHING* to do with how I interact with people? No, it does not.

This is because what I’ve accomplished is NOT “who I am”. Similarly, what other people have NOT accomplished is NOT “who they are”, either. To take that one level further… Not knowing that someone’s accomplished something does not make them NOBODY or INFERIOR. Learning that someone HAS accomplished something doesn’t automatically make them SOMEBODY or SUPERIOR, either.

I touched on this topic peripherally in “How’s your logo working for you?” when I mentioned meeting Nathan Freitas. To expand… We had just come from a great frisbee game, and a bunch of us headed out to celebrate and socialize afterwards. I had played against Nate, and I thought he did well, and I hadn’t met him before, so I introduced myself to him. He didn’t recognize my name, and I didn’t recognize his, but he knew of ReelSolid.TV, and he and I had actually had text-based interaction way before meeting IRL because he had commented on a video I did about men’s suits. Interestingly enough, even though I knew NOTHING about Cruxy.com at the time, I knew I had a picture with Mike Hudack while he was wearing a Cruxy shirt. Nate immediately and adamantly informed me that I was mistaken, at which time I turned on my camera and produced said picture:

The point that’s relevant to this particular post is that I didn’t go from “nobody” to “somebody” when Nate figured out “who I was”. I went from “a person” to “a person that Nate had heard of, and whose work he had seen”. Same thing with me. For me, Nate went from “a frisbee opponent” to “someone I’ve met who runs a site where artists can upload their work and get paid for it”.

Most people who meet me have no idea “who I am”, and I like it that way. They have no idea that I’m an MIT graduate. They have no idea that I’m DatingGenius.

Brass Rats: Phil, Limor, Bill

I like it that way, because people are REAL when they don’t have a reason to sweat you. I love being “judged” by what people see when they look at me. :D I love it when people play themselves, because there’s no returning from that. It’s like “Before you knew who you were talking to, you acted totally differently towards me”.

Anyway… I’ve had several interesting interactions over the last three weeks, revolving around the question “Who are YOU?”

I ended up at this party, and I saw this random chick hanging out with three of my homegirls. Out of the goodness of my heart, I decided to introduce myself to her. What I intended to do was say hello to her and move on to hanging out with my actual friends. So I say “Hi. I’m Bill”, and her response is “You sent me a friends request on Facebook, and I declined it”. HAHAHA So I’m like ?????? because this is a totally new situation for me. Usually, when chicks don’t accept you on Facebook, that’s because they don’t want to talk to you AT ALL, so when they’re around you, they don’t say jack to you. So I’m like “Wait a minute… Let me get this straight. You just informed me that I friended you on Facebook so you could tell me that you didn’t accept it? :D” and she’s like “Yeah… Who the hell are YOU?”

So, this was really funny, considering that I have over 500 Facebook contacts and over 280 Linkedin contacts and over 650 Twitter contacts and over 600 MySpace contacts, not to mention people that know “who I am” all over the planet, from Hawaii to the U.K. to Tokyo to The Netherlands to California to NYC. Meanwhile, I introduced myself to this chick “cold”, not recognizing her face or body from anywhere, and not recognizing her as someone that I sent a Facebook friends invite to. In the future, when I figured out “who she was”, I realized that I had friended her because I saw that we had 17 mutual friends. There was nothing interesting or appealing about her. Similar to what happened IRL, I was extending the hand of friendship to someone who was friends with friends of mine.

So I found the question “Who the hell are YOU?” to be ridiculous, because it was as if she was requesting for me to audition to be her Facebook friend when I didn’t give a damn about her in the first place. It was like *I* had something to gain from it. Meanwhile, I could have ignored her completely and interacted with my actual friends and my day would have been exactly the same, except for a funny story to tell about how people get souped up and think they’re worth knowing for some odd reason. :)

Another interesting reaction I got recently was at a party. At some point, I took a picture with some chick that I had met that night. About 22 hours after I posted the picture to my flickr stream, I got an email from her with some sob story about the reason why she was asking me to take it down. I didn’t believe a word she said, but I gladly made it private, because every picture I take and post is with people that want to take pictures with me. Just the fact that she was asking me to remove it was grounds for removal. The question here is… Why the hell are you taking pictures with people and not expecting those pictures to arrive on the net? The only uneducated guess I can come up with is that because she had never seen me before, she didn’t figure that a picture she took with me would end up anywhere of note. According to her sob story, she didn’t want certain people to see her partying. The question becomes a) Why were you partying in the first place, and b) Why were you taking pictures with people if you didn’t want to be spotted partying?

Last week, I approached this chick who’s active in social media and is always asking her ‘fans’ for things. When she sends out mass emails, she’s all friendly and acting like she knows who it is that she’s interacting with and cares about them. However, when I arrived, not only was she completely disinterested in who I might be, but she failed to even state what her name was. I didn’t bother asking her because I already knew her name and what she does. I found it funny how someone could be such a beggar in social media, yet totally didn’t promote herself IRL. What sense does it make to make contacts with people via computer and then alienate them in person?

OTOH… There are lots of people that I met during PodCampNYC or at various Twitter Meetups or Meetup Meetups that are either AS GENUINE as they appear online or even MORE SO. :D A lot of what we experience of people on the net is merely the characters they’re portraying in their “shows”. When the cameras aren’t rolling, and it’s down to one-on-one communication and interaction, that’s where people really shine or they don’t. That’s where you get to see how people act when there’s nothing in it for them. No audience. No revenue-sharing. No business deals. Just you and them. Person to Person. Face to Face. What’s it like for you to be around them? What’s it like for them to be around you?

Ultimately, the question “Who are you?” is unimportant. What’s important is how you carry yourself and interact with others. On the spur of the moment, when you meet someone, how do you react to them? How do you interact with them? Do you act differently based on their accomplishments or who they know? Can you have a good time with people that are willing to have a good time with you? What’s the threshold above which you’re willing to interact with someone standing next to you? Someone that sends you a social media ‘friends request’? Someone that’s a friend of a friend of yours, but you haven’t had personal contact with yet?

Is social media merely a networking tool for you, or are you looking to enrich your life by meeting interesting and intelligent people and cultivating relationships with them?

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