The Mouse's Roar

location: in my basement! in new jersey! with my front door unlocked!!

mood: contemplative

music: If you talk too much (my head will explode)

Ok so everybody and their mother has been reading about The Great Fall of HP Fen… including me… and it jus started me thinking about the foundations of personal interactions on the internet. 

Consider the way most people first approached this new medium of communication.  It became a way to communicate with the world from the privacy and security of your own home or office. You could find myriads of people with similar interests and share ideas and thoughts. 

And the best part of it was that it could be completely anonymous. 

In fact, most people refused to divulge their name, age, sex, current location.  Others actually misrepresented themselves in order to ‘protect’ their identities. I definitely recall my early days on the internet and how adamant I was that no one find out I was female, sometimes to the point of telling people I was an older male.  (My reasons being that I would not be a target to sexual predators that way.) And of course, that worked in reverse as well.  In fact, some of the earliest news articles about personal use of the internet were about 40 year old men posing as 14 year old girls, which is still going on today, unfortunately. 

Despite that, the limits that were so rigid during the early era of the World Wide Web have begun to relax. People have started meeting each other in RL, having group hangouts for their shared interests, and dating in person, even! And yet, the majority of online users continue to hide their identities from even the people they interact with on a daily basis.  It’s as if it’s been ingrained into the Netiquette that you can’t ask someone their age, their real name or where they live/work/go to school.  It would be like asking a woman her bra-size.  Maybe after a few years of online ‘friendship’ you might finally get the privilege of finding out that Bluebug98’s first name is actually Kate

So the point is that this medium of communication actually fosters the kind of exploitation/manipulation we saw from msscribe.  The entire purpose of the internet was to be able to interact from a distance, to keep yourself removed from real life by entering this virtual social hub. Should we really be surprised? She just used the tools she was given. (I found out I could drop a class in high school without registering for a study hall, and found myself with a free period right before lunch where I didn't have to report to anyone. I used it to drive out for lunch.  It was a loophole that was there, and even though it was wrong for me to use it, can you really blame me or any hs student in the same shoes?)

The problem is that for a lot of people, this is their main mode of communication.  I personally have almost stopped taking phone numbers from people I meet in person. Now the pick-up line is, “Can I get your screenname?” If all of the socializing we’re doing us online, can we really afford to treat the internet as we always have? How can we establish any sort of healthy relationships with this ingrained need for secrecy and anonymity online? Should we be more open? Are there enough precautions and rules in place to make it safe?  Or has the web culture become a culture of fear and paranoia (like the American culture)? Maybe we should learn from the Canadians and leave our doors unlocked.

That’s what I’m taking back with me from all this.

p.s. somebody really needs to start a college class on the Sociology of the Internet or even an MA program for it. i'd totally take it.