'I' for Internet

The Internet is a world of its own. You Twitter each other, checking out FaceBook profiles and updating your status on Myspace. You blog your life like you would in a private journal, you change your MSN name to clue in on your life, you Instant-Message on practically every social network there exists. 

Aren't we all just oh-so-chummy?

What the Internet does, though, is distort the real person that you might be (that is, considering you have a life out there, which might just be me imagining things or you wouldn't be reading this right now). Or rather, it tests the limits of your privacy. Like, if I whipped out pictures of a new DSLR and posted it all over FaceBook, you can bet that when we next meet, our conversation will be nothing like this:

Me: Guess-what-guess-what-guess-what?

You: What?

Me: I got a new DSLR!

You: Oh my goodness! (combined excited screech)

Instead, it'd be more like this:

Me: I got a new DSLR!

You: Oh yeah. I saw.

Me: You did?

You: Facebook.

Me: Ah. Okay. Right. (scrambles in head for next topic)

See? No feverish scream, no overwhelming excitement, no flurry of great ado, and whatever suspense you could have had was resolved the moment you breathed through the window of the Internet world. 

Then again, we're stuck in this superficial net of websites and webpages so there may not be any point in trying to resist it. Unless, of course, I do it and you do it and a whole great army of people do it and suddenly we're this amazing fleet of new people renewing an old idea of socializing.

Who knows. We could be the next wave of non-computer people.