The masks of inscrutability, or are you really you?

[Aiwendil]

This is an interesting thread, and one that touches on an issue I have sometimes thought about. Does the internet mask us or does it take our masks away?

The general view, and one that I daresay this thread takes for granted by its very nature, is that when using the internet, one is somehow cut off from the other users. An internet personality with whom one interacts is "inscrutable". It could be anyone. It could be a teenager, or an old man, or a middle-aged woman, or any manner of person. And people on the internet, I often hear it said, are capable of lying. A forty year old man can say he's a fifteen year old girl. In short, the conventional wisdom seems to be that the internet obscures people. Perhaps internet users can indeed get to know each other, but in doing so they are overcoming a barrier. They are "masked".

My view tends to be quite the opposite. Sure, I don't know what anyone else on this forum actually looks like. But, quite frankly, I also don't care what any of you look like. In many cases, I don't know your ages; in some cases, I don't know your sexes. But again, I don't care. Maybe (far-fetched as it seems) some of you in fact lie about these things. A third time: I don't care.

You see, the way I look at it, the internet doesn't mask us. Rather, it takes away the masks we wear elsewhere. In the physical world, people dress differently; some people are old and others are young; some are male and some female; some are attractive and some are ugly. When two people interact, they can't help but to notice these things, and inevitably judgements are made; preconceptions arise. On the internet, all that matters is what one says. Here, it is a person's mind that counts; the physical guises that we wear in "the real world" are stripped away. It's almost a kind of osanwe.

I'm not saying that the "dangers" of the internet are fictitious. People can lie on the internet - but then people can lie in real life too. Nor is the communication it affords absolutely direct and uninhibited; the language into which we must translate our thoughts before we share them can often be cumbersome. But I would say that someone who interacts with me only through the internet probably knows me - that is, the real me, my mind - better than someone who interacts with me in the real world for a comparable amount of time.

Of course, in practice, such relationships suffer in comparison to real world ones for the simple reason that most people spend less time on the internet than they do off it.