Webupon

I’ve never accepted the popular view on online interaction that it’s somehow less meaningful because you’re not person-to-person, face to face, and I think a lot of the foundations of these arguments are severely unstable.

Let’s begin with the issue of identity. There’s millions of cases of mistaken or false identity over the internet, so much so that it’s evident in almost every active community like one I’ve observed on a gaming forum. It’s very simple to imitate another person’s behavior, assume a person’s identity, or create an entirely new person. There are a plethora of people who act differently than their “true” nature outside of the forum around “regular people” (as if people are less real because you’re connected through a machine).

We’re confronted with this issue of identity often and forming bonds of trust and friendship become less stable as the person or persons are more cautious of the information they release and the connections they make. This caution barrier set up between your emotions and the people surrounding you takes away from the person you really are – you’re holding back, and thus you are just as guilty of falsifying your image as any other person pretending to be something they are not.

Further problems arise when we question why a person does this. What is it that motivates a person to not be them self? Those who detach themselves from interactive situations could find that because it’s so easy to do, they should. These are the people most often found posting and acting out for “shock” value to stir up emotions among people who supposedly care more than the instigator themselves. Perhaps a person chooses to act differently because they want to mask an insecurity or flaw of there’s, or emphasize one of their better qualities. This often relates to physical appearance, posting pictures of people who’re not you.

While a person’s intentions and motivations are not always clear for socially detaching them self and accepting notions that ideas are less valid, relationships are disposable by the click of an X, or that people are less real, it is an ironic backfire that occurs when someone chooses to act like this.

By believing in the notions stated above, you’ve allowed yourself ample room to cruise the internet carefree, trolling and causing mischief under the pretenses that nothing you do matters – that nothing anybody does matters. However, it would seem that the amount of effort made to create a persona or character for you to play exceeds the amount of effort of the member with 5,000 posts who is just the person he appears to be. It’s far more simple to be yourself and act and think and interact with people as you would normally had you met them face to face in a club or something, than it is to act differently for the sake of causing mischief.

The issue of identity brings about the issue of instability. The issue of instability is the unpredictability one another person’s actions and responses to the development of a friendship. People are just as real regardless of how they’re encountered. In fact, one’s negation of the serious potential to make connections fails to realize the exceptional potential for world-wide encounters and experiences. Thanks to forums like our own, the most trivial and severe information can be distributed for tens of thousands of viewers; our peers are no longer geographically limited, and everything from ideas, wisdom, skills, to emotions can be expressed on a far larger scale.

Furthermore, when in a social community environment, like a forum, members can often be found taking initiative to research topics, learn information being taught, engage in debates varying from what’s going on in politics to what’s going on with religion and science. It is this motivation that allows a child or teenager to nourish more elements in life’s experiences that they will later encounter. When people fail to take “teh internetz srsly”, they fail to take advantage of amazing opportunities to advance their knowledge, skills, social development, and relationships.

How many new people from all across the country or nation have you met and made some kind of bond of friendship? I don’t even have to mention any of this to members with over a years experience on any forum, who’ve generated thousands of posts.

I’ve ranted long enough, so I’ll let this go on now. I mean, look how serious I’m being?

The internet is a serious business.