Understanding the game
published: June 27th, 2008
Understanding the game
image: jprowland
Understanding the internet is something that I’m trying to do. Of course it’s brilliant that we can interact with one another, there’s a kind of anonymity that allows people to be things that in the real world they’re not. I’m beginning to get it.
There’s a perceived safety that grows out of not having to commit yourself to anything. The brain is in its heaven here, it doesn’t have to do anything that it doesn’t want to. Including reading the next sentence.
So what is so compelling about this medium?
I think there’s an element of hide and seek. People trawl the net looking for answers. Some people allude to answers that they can’t provide and become thereby charlatans and fakers. There is always a ready audience of gullible punters.
As each new member of the internet family comes online they discover the Aladdin’s cave of treasures that awaits them. After a while they realise that it is just a circus. Another parade of smoke and mirrors.
Who in the human story has ever come up with the goods? If you know someone who has, then you hold tight onto the thing that they managed to capture.
If it’s some brainwashed version of some fantasy messiah then sorry folks, but that won’t do. I’ve got nothing against these guys but factor in the hopes and fears of thousands of years worth of devotees and you’re on a mainline to confusion. The opportunity for deluded perception is well in season where those magical figures of fantasy are concerned.
The internet is a place where there is a suspicion that answers or at least clues may be had. I find a lot of spin, a lot of marketing hype and a lot of less than honest representations. I genuinely hope that this thing may become a powerful tool for positive change in human affairs but at this stage, in its infancy, I find it a less than satisfying experience.
It’s great as a shop front. A salesman’s paradise but does it go any further? If it’s a forum for people to be something they’re not then fine, providing they are something better and they can take the better person from cyberspace to the real communal world we all materially occupy together.
In this place, paedophiles can present themselves as twelve year old kids and access a world of innocence that they can only contaminate. I could present myself as being twenty one, six foot two and with the physique of an Olympic swimmer. Sadly, for me, none of this is true but you don’t know that.
I think I’m slowly getting part of this internet game.