Even when first I came to view the early BBS boards, I noticed the propensity of most to build caricatures of themselves. Petty in their motive, many would try to develop their communities through their own (self constructed) online mythos, and I was intrigued.
Culture is a fascinating aspect of human living. It's definition is as broad as human interests. Boundaries within online cultures are just as diverse, melding in some places, repelling in others.
Yet, everyone flies a flag in online spheres. Every person who makes a post, does so out of their own agenda, morals, or idealizations. Lurkers are another strata all together, but each lurker eventually becomes a speaker to plant their flag.
In the land where anonymity reigns supreme (or as least is believed to be), the internet, networking people into social communities and cultures is the purpose and product. I am not writing of 'social networking' however.
Pintrest gives selected likes, just as facebook allows for passing feigned care into other's affairs. Some even still use myspace. I consider these to be mediums only. McLuhan was correct in predicting that the medium can define the message. These mediums certainly can be measured into ways they truncate human contact, just as twitter allows 140 characters. Almost enough for an actual feeling, and almost enough for a complete thought.
These mediums do not define means to higher social contact, only means to their summary.
Where in the past one's interests and friends were geographically determined at birth, modifiable only with uprooting to new areas; Online strata brings about a new form of friendship and intimacy.
Harsher critics will certainly point to the methods of the medium being the sole root of social decay. They mistake the Facebook for replacing human contact, and they mistake the truncation of human contact as the new definition of human contact.
I pragmatically believe in something greater, wishful as it may be.
Just as the internet releases culture from being confined to geographical areas, I would like to believe that the internet also relays a deeper intimacy between users, because of the assumed anonymity.
No one worries that their neighbors will find out their porn preferences by snooping in their mail, yet everyone in the user environment of the internet is in some sense a neighbor.
No longer do users concern themselves with privacy, but instead willingly share their lives and their own special breed of culture without reservation or remorse.
The internet will always be for porn. However, that does not exclude it from playing a larger cultural relevance, and meaning, than the printing press.
It appears to me, that the ignorance of the seeming magical effect of the percieved anonymity has on people's willingness to share, only serves to stifle the burgeoning market of purer emotional exchange.
The global community has awoken to the metaphorical cramped legs of growing pains.
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