A young woman best described as livejournal user manque started using the free journal service over at perl.org to ruminate out loud about her life. On LJ, she would have enjoyed the privacy of the mall, but on perl.org, she stuck out so dramatically that the perl hackers accused her of being a bot. (As a friend of mine said, the goal of any true programmer is to fail the Turing test…)

Some of the denizens of perl.org suggested she should stay and learn perl, but some kind soul pointed her to LJ, to which she decamped.

I call this the hermit crab pattern, where the occupant of a social space is a differnet kind of creature than the one the space was designed for. I first came across this when there was a group of middle-aged women using the ultra-hip word.com bulletin boards as a kind of online kaffeeklatsch. (Prodigy users manque.)

This pattern is at least part of the answer to tech-determinism — the software doesn’t actually program what goes on in it; context and contrast are such strong human forces, they overwhelm the simple technical affordances and limitations. use.perl.org runs slashcode, which also runs slashdot — not only is the perl community quite different than the slashdot community, but our friend the livejournal user to be was different from the perl community as well.