I think it's like with everything else-- a) you can't have one single explanation for how different people react to any wide-spread social phenomenon; b) it's always the loudest, most 'shocking' or just plain blatant reactions/interactions that make a good-- and quick-- story, so they're what gets rehashed over & over again until it's taken as a given.
It's not that the internet can't lead to blah-blah-blah dissociative behavior or blah-blah insincere manipulation, etc, it's just that you'll have certain sorts of people this involves (ie, newbies, young adult male forum junkies, debate forums & anon dating sites), and certain sorts of scenarios. The experience you get reading an interior decorating blog is a zillion miles from being in a chatroom on irc, or reading slashdot or a blog with a different, esp. political, focus, which is a zillion miles from livejournal slash fandom (which is waaaaay different from yaoi/shoujo manga forums in terms of both demographic and interaction style), which is a zillion miles from myspace and y!m (which has a subtly different culture/demographic than AIM or icq, etc), respectively, and forget about the online gamers and the RPG-crazy people. All of those are 'representative' of the online experience in their own way, if you go by demographic. Very few people actually have experience with all these widely different milieus, esp. people who then go on to write about the social dynamics on the internet for some strange reason. Research, what?? haha. I... er... happen to be familiar with many different online subcultures, but that just makes me realize how little I really know-- 'cause I dip my toe in somewhere like 4chan or the blogging world & find an abyss. :P
One reason no one gets it is that no one gets that to talk about the internet social game with authority, you can't see it from the outside. You have to be able to not just observe these subcultures, but interact in a way that fits in somewhat, to get the real flavor. You *have* to fit in, or you won't get it, bottom line. And who could really fit in in both 4chan, slashdot, an interior design blog circle, HP slash fandom and so on an so forth? Certainly not me, I just live here :P
My point is, you have to approach it like an old-school anthropologist, and no one does; they don't get that the online world both is and isn't like a separate country with its own regional and sub-regional specifics in terms of dialect and custom (and speech-pattern), which means it's still human, still real, still... rational. Back in the day, anthropologists did exactly this-- they tried to fit in and observe, spent years staking out their 'prey' and getting slowly deeper in. That's what you'd have to do on many different fronts before you could really have any right talking about how people communicate online.
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Date: 2008-02-16 12:44 am (UTC)It's not that the internet can't lead to blah-blah-blah dissociative behavior or blah-blah insincere manipulation, etc, it's just that you'll have certain sorts of people this involves (ie, newbies, young adult male forum junkies, debate forums & anon dating sites), and certain sorts of scenarios. The experience you get reading an interior decorating blog is a zillion miles from being in a chatroom on irc, or reading slashdot or a blog with a different, esp. political, focus, which is a zillion miles from livejournal slash fandom (which is waaaaay different from yaoi/shoujo manga forums in terms of both demographic and interaction style), which is a zillion miles from myspace and y!m (which has a subtly different culture/demographic than AIM or icq, etc), respectively, and forget about the online gamers and the RPG-crazy people. All of those are 'representative' of the online experience in their own way, if you go by demographic. Very few people actually have experience with all these widely different milieus, esp. people who then go on to write about the social dynamics on the internet for some strange reason. Research, what?? haha. I... er... happen to be familiar with many different online subcultures, but that just makes me realize how little I really know-- 'cause I dip my toe in somewhere like 4chan or the blogging world & find an abyss. :P
One reason no one gets it is that no one gets that to talk about the internet social game with authority, you can't see it from the outside. You have to be able to not just observe these subcultures, but interact in a way that fits in somewhat, to get the real flavor. You *have* to fit in, or you won't get it, bottom line. And who could really fit in in both 4chan, slashdot, an interior design blog circle, HP slash fandom and so on an so forth? Certainly not me, I just live here :P
My point is, you have to approach it like an old-school anthropologist, and no one does; they don't get that the online world both is and isn't like a separate country with its own regional and sub-regional specifics in terms of dialect and custom (and speech-pattern), which means it's still human, still real, still... rational. Back in the day, anthropologists did exactly this-- they tried to fit in and observe, spent years staking out their 'prey' and getting slowly deeper in. That's what you'd have to do on many different fronts before you could really have any right talking about how people communicate online.