With the advent of the Internet we had, for the first time, a medium where any induvidual wouldn't be judged upon his looks, skincolour or sexual preferance. For the first time, all men were created equal.
Why weren't people biased? Because they couldn't be biased when they didn't knew. People knew nothing of you, except from your handle and perhaps your IP adress if you ran across a nerd. Simply put, the internet allowed you to become the person you wanted to be. You could change haircolour, gender, work, hope and dreams, all by pressing of different buttons on your keyboard. The people you talked to in the chatrooms or mailing boards believed your word, because there wasn't anything else to believe. They had no reason to believe it was lies.
Naturally, people soon noticed the possibility of this, and exploited the system for all it was worth. Adult talkrooms brimming over with pubescent teenagers on the outlook for a quick fix of dirty conversation, perhaps utterly unattractive people who just wanted to talk to someone, be it in the next town or half-way across the planet. The person you became on the internet didn't have to have anything with your former personae.
The boy everyone in school bullied around could suddenly become a tyrant on his own, flaming outsiders who dared intrude into the part of the electronic jungle he had claimed as his own. Everyone became so much more handsome than they were in real life; you lost the meaning of 'face value'. Then, if someone got closed aquainted, perhaps they wanted to see a picture, and of course you'd send them a picture of yourself, looking faintly lees goofish than you do in real life. The recipient would look at it, think 'Is THIS the person I'm talking to?', then take a look at her- or himself and think that it wouldn't matter anyway, he'd still be the same person they had talked to before and enjoyed the conversations with.
Naturally, there wasn't anything against sending pictures not of yourself, and so could the deceit continue....
Not too long ago, a situation took place, which made me think about the reversal of identity the Internet has caused. A female friend of mine, whom I've never met in person, but I still like to call a close friend was in a chatroom with me, as a friend of her entered, whom I've had only spoken to briefly before. As this was a MIRC-room, me and my friend decided to exchange identities for a brief moment, just for the hell of it. Personally, I doubted if anyone would be fooled, but nontheless, we swapped names, and thereby our identities. To the Internet, I had become her as she had become me. Originally intended as a brief laugh, the joke led on as our victim couldn't tell that the swap had been made, and before we knew it an hour had passed. For an hour I had been someone else, and not even her closest friend was able to tell the difference. Then the convincing that we'd really done it took another thirty minutes to our poor guinea pig. She would simply not believe that she had been fooled. For her, she had been talking to the same girlfriend she'd known for the past eight years and nothing on this world could convince her otherwise. Of course, the situation was easily rectified, with me telling dirty jokes in a foreign language her friend did not know, and her friend providing her with secrets from her own past, but the effect was devastating...
That this experiment was so successful that it was, I attribute to the fact that my friend and I had been talking enough to each other to mimic each others idiosynchrasies. Her favourite expression, a certain way of phrasing questions; it was all the person on the other side on the net was looking for, a confirmation that it was really her friend that she was talking to.
What happens if you can't trust the identity of your speaking partner?
What happens if you're so good at being someone else that you've forgotten how to be yourself?
A lot of people wants to escape from their own lives, unhappy with whatever situation life has put them in. A lot of people want to be someone they aren't. The act of refusing to look the cold realities of real life in the eyeballs aren't going to do shite for your so-called electronic life. It might save your real life, though.
Electronic life, that's another funny term.
Nowadays, most people can seperate their identity into two distinct persons; The Person and The E-Person. The Person has different friends and hobbies from the E-Person.
Fan-fic writing? How many does that on paper? That's an E-Person hobby.
Football, handball, swimming? Things only doable by a real Person.
MIRC, online-gaming, big brother-watching? Ditto, only with an E-Person.
Excessive masturbation? hmmm..... I'd have to say both.
That's yet another funny thing; Cyber-sex.
The act of having a faked intercourse between two persons who most likely can't get laid in real life, substituting the soft touch of skin and the delicate smell of another person with the plastic keys of the keyboard and the bright glare of the monitor in the semi-darkness. Still, it serves it's purpose, it makes two persons feel less alone, and that alone justifies it's existence. A side effect of this is that an alarming number of single men and women have learned how to type touch, using only one hand. I don't know about you, but I'm impressed by someone who can type faster that I can and masturbate while doing it, just to rub it in. Hmm...a pun came out of that sentence. Nevermind.
The point of all this digressing nonsense?
You can be anyone you want to, on the Internet. Don't abuse that. Don't let anyone else be you. Don't be anyone but yourself