Encountering is in the details.
There are tens of available P2P tools available for filing sharing. In order for two people to meet each other through sharing files they have to each be logging into the same program (or at least to the same file sharing network that different programs use).
But of course that's not enough. This is synchronous communication, meaning that both of these people have to be connected at the same time.
Most of these programs break up their network into numerous smaller networks, and randomly log users into one or another of these. This means that even when two users are connected via the same program, they're not necessarily going to be available to each other.
Even when the time, the program and the specific network are the same, numerous
inexplicable glitches in cyberspace can cause an inability to find the other person,
or perhaps we can see that person's files, but don't succeed in downloading them,
or even succeed in downloading, but not sending or receiving messages.
And of course even that's not all. Even in situations when everything seems right, we may simply not run a search for a particular file or artist that will bring up that other person. Perhaps last week we met someone because he or she had numerous files by an artist we were searching for, and now we're hoping that through searching for that artist we'll find that person again. But he or she may have changed the files available on his or her hard drive, and we simply don't know this. We end up looking in the right place, but for the wrong thing.
I think that it's precisely this lenghty list of variables and the need for all
of them to be correctly in place that attracts me to communication via P2P. The
allure may be less the desire for communication (and/or for files) but rather
the desire to play the odds and, even when they're highly stacked against us,
still win.
Go to: They may not even be there, or
Go to: Strangers on a network.