don't even know what to say

Anyone who's ever taken a psychology class would be able to tell the story of Kitty Genovese and the societal observation it gave birth to, known as the Genovese effect or the bystander effect. Her story is not easily forgotten. According to Michael Dorman of NewsDay, her 1964 murder in Queens - witnessed by 38 neighbors, none of whom acted to help her - became "a symbol of Americans' failure to get involved." Two weeks after the murder, the New York Times' Martin Gansberg described that failure to get involved as an example of the callousness and apathy of the big-city environment.

But why am I writing about this today? Today, on my way home in my own big-city environment, my mind occupied by trivialities like my upcoming thesis, I saw the Genovese effect proven wrong. It was about an hour ago, and I'm still shaken, but I'm hopeful. Two men were hanging around the benches near my home metro station, and as usual, I took care to avoid eye contact with the loiterers, thinking you could never be too careful after dark in the city. As I got closer, I noticed that there was a third man on the ground. The back of his head was bleeding freely, and his eyes were closed. Glancing up at the two men who were standing, I noticed a little ruefully that they were not in fact loitering, but discussing what to do.

I stopped to ask what had happened and what I could do, and thinking about it now, I'm so glad it didn't occur to me to walk on. Apparently, he'd hit his head pretty hard and fallen. Neither of his helpers knew him, I realized, as he regained consciousness and looked up at them in confusion. Within a few minutes, and with the support of nearly every person who passed us and stopped to help, an ambulance was on its way, and we'd propped up his head with a towel from a nearby building, coached him not to move, and enlisted a security guard's help. The man was conscious and talking - though a little incoherently - and it looked like he'd be okay. Though I didn't do anything useful but summarize the situation for the security guard, it was only after her arrival that I felt I could leave.

And I wasn't the only one, I was happy to notice. All but one of the passersby stopped, and not one of us who stayed felt comfortable doing nothing to help. And thanks to the help of total strangers, I'm pretty sure he'll be okay. As unfortunate as the event was - and I still don't know what he hit his head on or how - it's so good to confirm my faith in the people around me. I saw tonight that we are basically good, even if we lose sight of that once in a while. In a big-city environment, we're so ready to isolate ourselves with iPods and the Express on the morning commute, and so quick to clutch our bags when a friendly tourist smiles or says hello. But when it counts, we do care about and help each other, and even better, we don't think twice about it.

gchattiquette

Isn't it funny how a website or piece of software can acquire a personality? I came across this article a while back that discussed the different types of kids - back then, it was mostly kids - who used Facebook and MySpace. The past couple of years, I've seen the same sort of thing happen with instant messaging applications. AIM's the one you keep since you've had it since middle school, Skype's the one you downloaded when your close friends started studying abroad, and gchat's the one that's sort of legit, the one you can sneakily use at work. Because hey, I was just checking my email! It's not my fault my friend decided to IM me.

Not that I would ever do such a thing, of course...

However, there's one pesky (but sometimes, so convenient) thing about gchat with great potential for awkwardness. You know what I'm talking about. That option that for most of us came with the default settings, which Gmail phrases as "Automatically allow people I communicate with often to chat with me and see when I'm online." Combined with another default setting, this one called "Show in chat list: Most popular", this means that exchanging emails with someone can put them in your chat list, and you on theirs. The kicker? If your usage of gchat is uneven, or if your friends are always online and theirs aren't, you might not even know it. It's fine in a lot of situations, like when a friendship develops naturally or you don't want to be so obvious as to "want to be able to chat with" a crush. But when that person is the random guy who bought your couch on Craigslist or the HR contact at the company you want to work for, this may not be the greatest thing.

Which brings me to my story. A couple of weeks ago, Michelle Obama came to speak to the employees of the federal agency where I work. After standing in line for an hour and in the room for another hour, and seeing her for an (oh so worth it) fifteen minutes, I came back to my office cube ready to share the excitement and discuss what she wore and what she said (yes, in that order. This is Michelle O. we're talking about, after all). Naturally, I changed my gchat status to "I saw Michelle Obama today!" In the flurry of IMs that followed in the next few hours - it was the most popular I'd been in ages - I noticed a couple of interesting things:

• First of all, the chat list unevenness I referred to earlier came up. One group of my friends, when planning an event, tends to send out mass emails and "reply all" with anything they have to say. As a result, though I hardly know some of them, I have exchanged a number of emails with all of them. Their IMs asking about Michelle were what first alerted me to the fact that I can show up on someone's chat list without that person showing up on mine. I wondered how many previous status messages they had seen, mentally going through what I may have unknowingly revealed in the past few days.
  
• Secondly, people have two distinct ways of responding to an interesting gstatus. They either refer to it explicitly, saying something like "you saw Michelle? I'm so jealous!"; or they take it as part of the context, saying something like "awesome!", which would make no sense if, say, my chat list was minimized (as it often is) and I forgot what it said (as I often do). To draw a Facebook parallel, it's the difference between writing on someone's wall in response to an interesting status, and commenting on it directly.
  

So, readers, what other gchattiquette rules have you noticed? There's got to be plenty.