There may be some truth to this: we're physical beings, not just brains in vats, and we really do need to hear voices and see faces, and we make them up when we don't have them. If you take this projection too far, it's easy to mistake imaginary relationships for real ones. It's easy to get sucked into a world where you don't have to accept the realness of people and their emotions and agendas and interests that are truly separate from yours and to a large extent beyond your control. I think the MsScribe stuff that went down a few of years ago was a good example of that. MsScribe saw people online as just specters in her own fantasyland. I don't think she was some kind of sociopath who would have inflicted pain on people who seemed real to her. It's just that the GT folks and Christina didn't seem real to her.
Not that people don't often inflict pain face-to-face. Of course they do. But the Internet gets rid of one of our instinctive barriers against that, which is the necessity of dealing with consequences in the physical social world (even if that consequence is just someone bursting into tears in public and you having to watch). That's a world you can't shut off and disconnect yourself from the way you can from your computer and your online friends.
On the other hand, there may be some advantage to occasionally having conversations without getting distracted by someone else's weight, hair color, ethnicity, personal history, socioeconomic class, annoying facial tics...you can meet people who you'd never talk to otherwise and become friends with them.
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Date: 2008-02-15 03:11 pm (UTC)Not that people don't often inflict pain face-to-face. Of course they do. But the Internet gets rid of one of our instinctive barriers against that, which is the necessity of dealing with consequences in the physical social world (even if that consequence is just someone bursting into tears in public and you having to watch). That's a world you can't shut off and disconnect yourself from the way you can from your computer and your online friends.
On the other hand, there may be some advantage to occasionally having conversations without getting distracted by someone else's weight, hair color, ethnicity, personal history, socioeconomic class, annoying facial tics...you can meet people who you'd never talk to otherwise and become friends with them.