Wow

Isn’t it strange how we get wrapped up in our own little world. Here I am adding an entry into a blog that is accessible by anyone on the internet and yet I manage to forget that when I am writing it (not in this case obviously). The reason that it has just hit me is that someone called Damo posted a comment about a previous entry.

This is one of the few comments we have had as mostly it is just our friends who read this to check up on us and see that we are alright with no major catastrophes. This is the first time it has become apparent that anyone out there other than people we know actually reads this stuff. Then you get into the self doubt “should I make it more interesting?”, “is it interesting?”, “do people like me?”.

It is like one of the first times I posted on a message board. I was trying to ask what I considered a sensible, and for me an important, question. I was expecting responses letting me know what I could do to resolve my problem (and I did get some of these). Several of the responses basically told me not to worry about it and that I really should get out more.

That shocked me at the time. It was, for me as an adult, the first time that someone was critically assessing exactly what I had written and was responding with no emotional attachment to me and was telling me exactly what they thought. It was a bit like putting a small piece of myself into the public domain and asking what people thought about ME.

This is one of the differences that the web brings. With the right tools you are able to communicate with everyone and anyone anywhere. What that also brings with it is the necessity of making sure that we are communicating what we mean to communicate. face to face and within our own cultures this has been traditionally easy to do with the various facial and tonal nuances that we add to the message.

Facelessly over the web where it is possibly different languages and cultures it is harder. You have to include all the relevant info and make sure you have clearly expressed yourself. This is where things like smilies came from I suppose, there was no way to include a smile with a sarcastic comment until the smiley came along, adding emotion without making it dry to the reader.

After writing all this I cannot remember for the life of me whether there was a point to any of the previous ramblings but I felt it was important to share them with you. Thank you to Damo (who ever you are) for just letting me know that there is more than just my friends out there on the internet.

Also to Damo, do you think that the sorts of people who would discriminate on the basis of email domain are also the ones at school that bullied other people? The sorts of people that had to have the latest (whatever it was at the time) to make sure that that they had it to make sure they were interesting to their friends?

To Ned; is it that you discrimnate or that you make assumptions? I had a dilemma at university as I thought for a while that I had started to become a racist towards one group of people. In the end I realised that I was not a racist. I had become prejudiced towards them because of their behaviour and started to stereotype/make assumptions based on my experiences of them. With one you can get over it, with the other your opinion can never be changed.