RantSome: A Personal Soapbox Site

I've been on the net for a long time. Not as long as some, of course. I mean, the internet has been around since the late 1960s, when various educational institutions networked themselves together in order to more easily share information and communicate, so there are obviously people who have been on the net a lot longer than I have, but, relatively speaking, I have been on the net for a long time (since 1993, in case you actually care).

I've been on the net long enough to remember when Usenet was worth reading. I remember when the vast majority of email addresses ended with .edu rather than .com. I remember what it was like before the masses discovered "The Information Superhighway" and proceeded to invade it in a curious, clueless, overwhelming hoarde. I remember what the net was like before the World Wide Web was a phenomenon, when the only graphical web browser available was NCSA Mosaic and HTML wasn't even capable of offering centered text and browsers could view only one graphic type and it was a .gif file. I remember when Yahoo was just an index that was part of the personal web page of some guy at Stanford University.

In the years I've spent as a citizen of the internet, I've naturally known a lot of other people via this medium. Some were passing acquaintances. Some became long-term friends. One became my husband, despite the fact that we lived on opposite sides of the planet. So I should note that I'm somewhat biased when it comes to the notion of relationships that start out on the net. Of course I believe that they can be very real and very enduring, and am quite aware that they don't always amount to a hill of beans.

One of the things I've encountered that annoys me is the notion that since it's "just the net" it must not be "real". Because you're not physically in the room with someone, you can't possibly have a "real" relationship with them. You're not "really" friends or you're not "really" in love or whatever. Well, I have to tell you, I personally know several couples who met on the net and who went on to have a successful and satisfying real-life relationship, and a lot more people who met on the net and went on to form long-lasting friendships, all in the "real" world.

The first thing to consider here is what constitutes "real". If it's only physical proximity, I'd call that pretty shallow. If friendship or romantic relationships are based merely on physical attraction or physical closeness, what kind of relationship is that? One that will necessarily stand the test of time?

Some people maintain that people on the net could represent themselves as other than what they are. This is certainly very true. I know a man who was in the habit of logging on to talkers and chat programs as a woman and completely misrepresenting himself in the most basic of ways. Yup, that happens, and it's a sleazy trick to pull, for sure.

However, misrepresentation happens all the time in "real" life, too. Maybe it's hard to disguise your gender or something else like your race or your eyeglasses or crooked teeth, but it's quite easy to lie about your family, your education, your age, your job, your financial situation, your marital status, and so forth. Some people are so charming and such skilled liars that they can persuade you to believe all manner of lies, to the point of becoming con artists. There's no guarantee that seeing someone in the flesh means that what they represent themselves to be is legitimate.

One of the things I've heard is, "Oh, I wouldn't want to meet someone I knew from the net. They could turn out to be an axe murderer or something!" Yeah, they could. So could that guy sitting next to you in the library. So could the chick behind the counter at your favorite coffee shop. Axe murderers don't exactly go around advertising the fact, you know what I mean? Doesn't matter if it's on the net or elsewhere. (And it certainly seems that many serial murderers seem to have neighbors who report that, "He was such a nice, quiet man. I'd never have thought he could do something like this!")

On the other hand, you have people who use "it's just the net" as an excuse for all manner of hurtful or socially inappropriate behavior. They treat people they meet with amazing scorn. Lie to them, make promises of love and possibly marriage, lie about who they are and what they're doing, you name it. It's possible to be incredibly nasty to people via the net, just as with any medium. However, when it's done on the net and the person being mistreated complains to the perpetrator, the excuse is that "it's just the net" and they dismiss their cruelty by noting that they're "not really like this in real life".

Well, it's not always "just the net". In fact, it's almost never "just the net". The internet is a medium for communication, and there are real, living human beings behind the web pages, behind the articles on a bulletin board, behind the nick on IRC. What it all boils down to is that the internet is nothing more or less than a way for people to communicate, do business, interact, and otherwise have discourse with other people. It's not the computers that are talking to each other in chat rooms, and it's not the graphics programs that are making the online art, and it's not the web page generators that are creating the millions and millions of pages that make up the world wide web.

So if you're one of those people who think that anyone you haven't met in "real" life isn't real, think again. Of course they might be lying to you and misrepresenting themselves, but so might your accountant be quietly siphoning off your money into a hidden Swiss bank account. They're still real people, even if they're liars or con artists or jerks.

And if you're one of the jerks, one of the people who goes online to a chat room and makes trouble, who goes to an infertility bulletin board and flames people for seeking treatment and wanting babies, who goes to a gay chat room and makes anti-gay hate statements, who logs on to a talker and plays head games with people or pretends to be the opposite gender or some equally nasty online social misbehavior, you're still a jerk, regardless of your chosen medium of expression. Someone who uses the net to harass, manipulate, and hurt people is no better than someone who harasses, manipulates, and hurts people in "real" life.

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Just the Net