My train of thought was wandering around tonight, and I came to some nice conclusions. Hopefully I'll be able to stay awake long enough to retrace it all the way.
Started out thinking about, of course, Suicide Girls. I'd been noticing myself getting annoyed when people refer to it as a "porn site," and found that odd. What else is it then? I think of it as more being based around the unique feeling of community that (bizarrely enough) can only facilitated under the faade of naked punk girls. Between the messageboard, the profiles, the news articles...
Then I remembered how, especially when I was younger (but still now), adults tended to think of the term "online community" as an oxymoron. For those of us who have grown up in the Internet Age, it feels as natural (or for now, almost as natural) as an offline circle of friends, or even subculture. Just look at Myspace's popularity. As another example, I used to be active on band messageboards (and my ex still is on one centeres around a game programming language) where you can literally make lifelong friendships with people you will never talk to face-to-face. The older generation tends to look at this sort of socialization, at best, with bewilderment. I once asked my mom why, and she told me, "It's just not the same knowing someone only from emails and instant messages. Physically being in the same room with someone and hearing their voice and seeing their facial expressions are such huge parts of interaction that it's hard to imagine how you could feel like you're friends with someone without them."
There are a few ways you could go with that. First off, there has always been the possibility of people misrepresenting themselves. I don't deny this, but (forgetting internet predators for the moment) why is this an evil thing? It's certainly not exclusive to the internet; people have misrepresented themselves in public for as long as the race has been able to communicate. In other words, there may be fiction-writers online, but there are probably far more actors in "real life." For those of us who have trouble communicating verbally, I think the internet is instead far more conducive to honest self-representation than face-to-face conversation. The latter is constantly distracted by appearance, tone of voice, word choice, body language, nervousness -- all of which can be difficult to control for an awful lot of people. By the time your words register in the brain of whoever you're talking to, they have been so ornamented by this excess baggage that it's almost impossible that they'll interpret them the exact same way you intended them. In an instant message or email, you have the unfamilliar luxury of being able to communicate exactly what you mean.
Does a person exist as a mind, or as a body? Are your neurons the source of your thoughts, or is it something nonphysical that operates them? I think this is at the root of the question of whether an online community is a valid one. If I am nothing but a body -- one with unbelievably complex inner workings, perhaps, but still only a body -- online communication does indeed only show a small part of myself. I would indeed be defined not only by my thoughts but also by my mannerisms and appearance. However, if C.S. Lewis was right in saying that "You do not have a soul; you are a soul. You have a body", then my occasional tendency to stammer and my shaky hands and my inability to look someone in the eye while talking to them are inhibitors, not elaborations, on my expressing who I actually am and what I actually think. Inhibitions stripped away -- isn't this then a truer community than has existed all through history until the last ten years?
But like most things, it's a matter of philosophy and opinion. If I assume dualism and my parents assume monism, that sort of disagreement is bound to come up. But who's going to convince the other to convert? Who needs to?
Christ. It's too late to be going off on tangents.
Started out thinking about, of course, Suicide Girls. I'd been noticing myself getting annoyed when people refer to it as a "porn site," and found that odd. What else is it then? I think of it as more being based around the unique feeling of community that (bizarrely enough) can only facilitated under the faade of naked punk girls. Between the messageboard, the profiles, the news articles...
Then I remembered how, especially when I was younger (but still now), adults tended to think of the term "online community" as an oxymoron. For those of us who have grown up in the Internet Age, it feels as natural (or for now, almost as natural) as an offline circle of friends, or even subculture. Just look at Myspace's popularity. As another example, I used to be active on band messageboards (and my ex still is on one centeres around a game programming language) where you can literally make lifelong friendships with people you will never talk to face-to-face. The older generation tends to look at this sort of socialization, at best, with bewilderment. I once asked my mom why, and she told me, "It's just not the same knowing someone only from emails and instant messages. Physically being in the same room with someone and hearing their voice and seeing their facial expressions are such huge parts of interaction that it's hard to imagine how you could feel like you're friends with someone without them."
There are a few ways you could go with that. First off, there has always been the possibility of people misrepresenting themselves. I don't deny this, but (forgetting internet predators for the moment) why is this an evil thing? It's certainly not exclusive to the internet; people have misrepresented themselves in public for as long as the race has been able to communicate. In other words, there may be fiction-writers online, but there are probably far more actors in "real life." For those of us who have trouble communicating verbally, I think the internet is instead far more conducive to honest self-representation than face-to-face conversation. The latter is constantly distracted by appearance, tone of voice, word choice, body language, nervousness -- all of which can be difficult to control for an awful lot of people. By the time your words register in the brain of whoever you're talking to, they have been so ornamented by this excess baggage that it's almost impossible that they'll interpret them the exact same way you intended them. In an instant message or email, you have the unfamilliar luxury of being able to communicate exactly what you mean.
Does a person exist as a mind, or as a body? Are your neurons the source of your thoughts, or is it something nonphysical that operates them? I think this is at the root of the question of whether an online community is a valid one. If I am nothing but a body -- one with unbelievably complex inner workings, perhaps, but still only a body -- online communication does indeed only show a small part of myself. I would indeed be defined not only by my thoughts but also by my mannerisms and appearance. However, if C.S. Lewis was right in saying that "You do not have a soul; you are a soul. You have a body", then my occasional tendency to stammer and my shaky hands and my inability to look someone in the eye while talking to them are inhibitors, not elaborations, on my expressing who I actually am and what I actually think. Inhibitions stripped away -- isn't this then a truer community than has existed all through history until the last ten years?
But like most things, it's a matter of philosophy and opinion. If I assume dualism and my parents assume monism, that sort of disagreement is bound to come up. But who's going to convince the other to convert? Who needs to?
Christ. It's too late to be going off on tangents.
and what's so bad about porn anyway? isn't it always more fun when there's an element of interaction in it?