The internet / Broadband is now mostly widespread around the world and allows people to interact in real time with people they have never met or know anything about, this can be in a Video game, Chat room, Emails, Live Streaming and many other methods. For some people, if you took this away and were only left with a computer what would they do? Looking at myself, my “net” activities include watching people in UStream, Chatting in MSN, on Skype / iChat and downloading new things to play with. If I took the “internet” part out, personally I would not be on the computer half as much as I am now.
If we then took away computers as a mean to entertain – what would you then be doing? Watching TV maybe, going out with your friends a lot more, the cinema or many other things. You would be forced to interact with real humans and not some cyber person. This brings me onto another subject and I shall call this “Hiding behind the net”
Hiding behind the Net
When you go online in any form of Chat room, Game or similar medium – you can be whoever you want to be. This can be the annoying Spammer, the nice helpful person, the abuse angry person, a Female (f your male), tech expert and basically the list goes on. You can say what you want to the the other people as you know there is no come back – you can Hide your IP if you so wish and the worst that can happen – you can Temp Banned or blocked.
I see people arguing on forums and even to the point of them saying they are going to find that person and kill them (or similar) but the reality is none of this ever happens. This can be because the people are all from different countries for example and its not like you can spend lots of dosh to get a flight just so you can give them a piece of your mind person to person. What about the Teenager who gets a kick out of pretending to be female for example – sending some random picture they found on Google to pass themselves off as one sexy Chick – I do not know what they get out of this but I see it happen all the time.
Why does this differ from Real Life?
Imagine you are out and about and some Spotty faced Teenager walks up to you and start giving you crap, in this instance you can beat the crap out of them, get the police involved and so forth – this is why it just does not happen. Another aspect is that not just speech alone (or typing) gets the message across, the other half is Body Language. I shall give an Example:
In an office you have a guy who has lost his hair, you know him well as you work with him and get along just fine. You joke to him and say “Hey Baldy – get me a Coffee you @£$%” – As you will probably laugh as well (or just smile) – you both know that you are only having a laugh and all is well – no blood is spilt. Now put this context to say a Chat room and its starts to look a lot different – it could be seen as you are aggressive and before you know it – your banned.
The only way to combat this is Video chatting or even just Audio chat – There is no Hiding who you are as they can see you quite clearly on the screen.
