SPENCER: Who is going to be your Missed Connection?

The Internet-great lawless abyss of our generation. From a tender age, the net has played an integral role in our lives. It offers us everything. Shopping! Gambling! Food! News! Music! Sex? No, not pr0n (though there's plenty of it) --

dating? Matchmaking? Will the Internet satisfy every human need? In the future, will everyone really be famous for fifteen minutes?

Quite frankly, the net scares me. When strangers contact me on MyFacebookSpace I become uneasy, because deep down I still believe the net is only for nerds and perverts (that would be a great theme party, BTW). I'm a voyeuristic Internet user, I like to watch YouTube.com and look at pictures of my friends drinking beer out of a skillet. I just would never actively seek someone out over the net. It's too impersonal, too disconnected, too weird.

But oddly enough, I love Craigslist.org -- a place where you can sell your futon, get a job and find a glory hole. It's an epicenter of sexual deviants and one of the most anonymous places on the Internet. The resulting patchwork of Craigslist personal ads is often frightening, sometimes funny, but always incredibly entertaining.

The crème de la crème of Craigslist is Missed Connections. For those of you who aren't familiar with Missed Connections, it works on the same principle as public transit safety: "If you see something, say something."

Your basic Missed Connection is posted after a random encounter (usually in the grocery store or on public transportation, though baristas and waitresses have cornered the Missed Connections market) in which one person feels an overwhelming attraction to, say, the girl in the cereal aisle, but feels too awkward to say anything. So naturally, they log onto their computer when they get home and post a short description of the sighting, add smiley face emoticon and hope that the magic of the Internet will bring them their object of desire.

That is the basic Missed Connection, but they range from the odd "With Nipple Rings in Kennedy School Pool-- w4m -- 28" to the stalker-esque, "These Brown eyes will be seeking you out." What makes the prospect of a Missed Connection so compelling is simple. Everyone wants to be memorable -- for their face to stand out in a crowded bus or raucous bar. And finding love serendipitously, through a chance encounter -- well, that's the storyline to half of Hollywood's romantic comedies. You'd find his Missed Connection and exchange witty emails and meet for coffee and fall in love, Diane Keaton would play your mom. And you'd skip happily ever after into a life of cohabitation with a soundtrack of cutesy indie pop playing over the credits.

But that's not real life. Fate's not real unless you're Oedipus, and there's no way making eye contact with some scruffy dude in the Shaw's checkout line will lead to something substantial. The whole thing is based solely on physical attraction.

So imagine my surprise when my top policy advisor and fellow Missed Connection enthusiast, whom I'll call Karl, texts me this week. "OMG I have a missed connects LMAO." No way Karl, no way. But indeed, Karl had been innocently perusing the shampoo aisle when she caught the attention of a tall blond boy who followed her to the checkout line. And then he wrote about it on Craigslist.

By the time I arrived home, Karl and her Missed Connection had been rapidly closing the technological distance between them. From Missed Connection to email to AIM and finally to text. Real phone conversation and coffee were imminent. Karl was planning on meeting her Missed Connection, less than 12 hours after the shampoo aisle.

It was the ultimate Craigslist experiment (we'd posted a fake personal over the summer with really terrifying results). What could this boy want from Karl? Sex, duh. If looks were all that mattered in a Missed Connection, then would personality be a variable? We plotted that Karl adopt an abrasive personality complete with ludicrous stories about eating roadkill in her Texas hometown and cooking crystal meth to make spare cash. This guy knew nothing about her. All he knew is that she was hot, so how much abuse would he take to get to his goal? Just how superficial were Missed Connections?

Because whether it's Facebook.com, or Match.com or even pictureless Craigslist, no one is who they say they are on the Internet. It's all about the superficial: the MySpace angle mirror picture, the laundry list of 'cool' bands and 'very liberal' political views. When someone catches your eye on the Internet, it's not very different than in real life. They're just 3-D instead of in jpeg form. If the superficial is the entire attraction, then you probably won't get very far. As far as Karl's story, she came home safe -- despite the voice in my head singing "it puts the lotion in the basket" the entire time she was gone -- and she and Mr. MC haven't spoken since.

Meredith Spencer, a junior in the College of Communication, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. She can be reached at mspence@bu.edu.