A bad analogy for introversion

[erratio]

The main inspiration behind the game I posted yesterday (people familiar with the acronym game will recognise the format immediately..) was that I've recently been trying to come up with analogies to explain my introversion to others. My latest effort is to compare people's socialising ability to Internet bandwidth. So really extroverted people are on the social equivalent of the unlimited or 100GB plan, with enough bandwidth to support every new social connection they make. Me, I'm on dialup; not only do I establish new connections slowly but I can only sustain so many at a time. Certain people who tire me out more than most can hog my bandwidth and make me incapable of hanging out with anyone else until I stop seeing them for a while. And there are other people who I only see once in a blue moon due to their bandwidth/content ratio or started establishing a connection and then gave up either because of their ratio or because I had too many other connections open at the time.

As you can see, it's actually quite successful as an analogy. But like all models it has deficencies. And like all extended analogies I can't use it  without feeling as though I've been transported back to high school English, where the emphasis was on deconstructing the texts to find literary techniques and which result in the tainting of several books forever for a lot of people.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Well done: a very nice analogy!
As for me, there are certainly days when I feel as though I've an unlimited connection, but it's really just a question of where I happen to be and what I happen to be doing. Drinking alcohol, for example, seems to be the equivalent of stealing broadband from somebody else.

[erratio.livejournal.com]

Yeh, obviously mood is a big factor. Even I can feel extroverted under the right circumstances!
I've never tried the alcohol thing though; might be worth looking into. (Although then I'll turn into one of those people who always gets drunk at parties)