The internet is weird.

On the one hand it's almost completely anonymous. This leads to beople lying they faces off with no real repercussions. On The Internet you can be anything or anybody you want to.

But on the other hand people can be much more honest than they ever would be in real life. part of this comes from the anonymity previously mentioned and the mindset of "nobody will actually read this" but it's not completely anonymous, so your real identity can be found out. Also people sometimes feel safer behind the wall the internet provides. Even though everything is 'instant' it's not really. First something is written, then someone else has to read it and respond. These things can have a lot of time between them and sometimes the last two don't even happen. This delay and not having to deal with someone face to face and all of the body language that goes along with it can really simplify things that shouldn't be simplified. It's like the phone but worse; on the phone there are at least vocal inflections and you can't reword something five times or delete it before the message is actually sent. Because of the nature of the medium it really boils down to a typewriter and carrier pigeons but in a (relatively) faster way. In acting there is a thing called subtext. I don't really have a full grip on it but basically it about the way things are said and not actually the words. All of this is missing in internet communication and people are left to fill in the sub-textual blanks on their own. This is not a good system because the message can and will be decoded incorrectly. Yes, people can and do mis communicate on a regular basis in plain old human interaction but there's more data to draw from in those settings.

In history we were discussing ideologies and i brought up the idea that there is one end all be all reality and people just view it differently. The theory's a bit more complicated than that, but the gist is the more we know about something the closer we can come to really understanding the way it really is. In person to person communication there is much more information available to receive than just what is being said, and if you remove all of that the chance for miscommunication skyrockets.

I'm not really sure what I'm getting at other than by putting things on the internet they are observed, and just like in quantum physics, the act of observing can change the outcome of the experiment. Now I know this may seem against what I just said but it doesn't really.

That's all I can think of for now.  ¶ 3/09/2007 02:11:00 PM