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How an online classifieds site is changing Chicago.

Tuesday Oct 12, 2004.     By Freda Moon

Lifestyle Feed

I don’t remember the first time I used Craigslist.org or what I was hoping to find there. Originally from Northern California, I was likely looking for an apartment. San Francisco rentals were hard to come by during the so-called tech boom (or, as the rest of us knew it, the Great Real Estate Dearth). I do know that since that first discovery, I’ve been as hooked as a grad student on caffeine. I use the Web site, a sort of online classifieds free-for-all, for everything. And so, it seems, does everyone else.

Craigslist does the things most classifieds do (connects the people who have with the people who want), but it also boasts the benefits of the Internet: instant communication, anonymity and lax standards of decency. It’s this sort of online “community” that freaks out technophobes, and with good reason. In its role as a free and efficient gathering place, Craigslist has gone a long way toward replacing venerable traditions, such as the garage sale and the singles bar, for those who are hip to it.

On Craigslist, furniture is given away, bikes sold, apartments rented, and jobs offered. But here, you’ll also find an abundance of postings offering odd, often unexpected, things. I perused the site on one recent Thursday afternoon and found an offering of a free movie ticket to “Before Sunset” for “any interested soul.” Someone else was looking for information on drug treatment programs for “a friend.” There was a Great Lakes surfer looking for other Great Lakes surfers, wanting a rideshare to the waves. And then there was the offering of “$100 full service at a safe, upscale, discreet location near the intersection of State and Van Buren” in the erotic services section of the site. Because Craigslist is self-regulated (postings are “flagged” by community members), an inappropriate posting can either be bounced off the site by its readers or selected as one of the “Best of Craigslist,” a people’s choice award that gives props to those who skillfully subvert the form. Those chosen as the best receive nothing other than a link on the site’s homepage and the admiration of their peers. Because most of these postings are anonymous, whatever recognition they get for their keen sense of humor is likely to be privately enjoyed.

Northside Chicago’s Heather Green was voted among the Best of Craigslist for an anonymously posted “missed connections” ad. The posting was inspired, Green explained to me via email, by a real-life experience. After seeing a person dressed in black wool on a hot summer day, she describes “a ceaseless, rambling interior monologue” taking her over. She thought, “I am so incredibly funny, I should post this as a missed connection on Craigslist." Indeed, her posting, a sort of tongue-in-cheek tale about a chance encounter with a zombie, was very funny.

In her faux-ad, Green seeks a woefully thin, black-clad stranger who, by virtue of his traits, she’s determined to be among the ranks of the undead. To the zombie-stranger she glimpsed on the L, Green offers an invitation: “if you would like to eat some of my brain (and maybe turn me into a zombie, too), that would be fine…I'm kind of bored with my job and would not mind wreaking havoc with you in or around Rogers Park/Edgewater.” Ultimately, however, Green’s only interested in being friends. She makes her intentions clear and concludes that any contact would be “on a strictly platonic basis, of course, as I am not into lesbian zombie sex, though I fully realize the camp value.”

Green visits the missed connections section of Craigslist occasionally in the hope that someone will have missed her, though it hasn’t happened yet. As if afraid that this admission will give the wrong impression, she emphasizes that she’s not looking for a relationship, “it's strictly for the ego boost.” Green’s not alone in having fun with Craigslist. Nor is she alone in using the site to nontraditional ends.

Unlike newspaper classifieds that are fee-based, Craigslist is free, which encourages people to post things they wouldn’t pay to have listed. For example, I recently traded an invitation to Google’s new, invite-only, email program, G-mail, for a pack of cigarettes, something I would never have thought to do had it involved any inconvenience or cost. Using Craigslist, the transaction was simple (the G-mail guy lived around the corner from me). It allowed me to exchange something I had and didn’t want, for something he had and didn’t need. He had an excess of the invites (a strangely valuable commodity these days, since the new program is a techie craze), he explained, and was trading them for cigarettes so that he could make them available to his roommates. It was his attempt to keep them from thieving all of his own smokes. When I was recently in need of a car for a research trip to Iowa, I again posted under the barter section. This time, I offered to trade my Web design skills for the use of a car for a weekend. I got several responses and made arrangements with one very trusting (though he admitted to having Googled me) to drive a flashy red Grand Am that weekend.

These are the types of things that Craigslist makes possible. It is changing the city, bringing it together, opening it up and making strangers accessible to each other in ways good, bad and a bit naughty. In this way, it’s like a lot of other sites on the Internet, like Friendster.com or the much-heralded political organization Moveon.org. As Heather Green, the zombie lover observes, “The net is sort of like the nation's id, especially if you think of the nation as a randy adolescent boy. Which I do.” So do I, Heather, so do I.