A couple of years later, still enamored with Apple, I bought a Performa and discovered the incipient entity known as the World Wide Web. Since my computer came loaded with America Online, getting connected was fairly straightforward and it wasn't long before I was hosting chat rooms in an area called Issues in Mental Health every week.
Compared to Facebook and Twitter it was rudimentary, I suppose, but we managed to create a sense of community among people who, for the most part, might never have met otherwise. The anonymity helped (everyone used virtual identities) and comments seemed spontaneous and disingenuous. What fascinated me was how the group dynamics were similar to those I'd observed face to face. Some members were mostly silent -- "lurkers" we called them -- while others carried the conversation and encouraged the timid to join in. If a member became rude or unruly, others would set limits. It was really quite healthy, overall.
Looking back, I found the experience of creating and fleshing out an online personality to be genuinely refreshing. For one thing, even though it was still me, it was me in a way that was more confident, comfortable, and frankly, more interesting than the person I felt I was in daily life. He was definitely smarter than I was and a better writer. But, since I wasn't conjuring this persona out of thin air, he had to have come from somewhere. And the better I got to know him, the more like him I think (I hope) I became.
I'm bringing this up today because there's a growing dialogue in psychiatry about the impact of online social networking, especially on teenagers. While I'm not ready to weigh-in on that yet, I thought it might be a good idea to share my own history as a starting point. If you'd like to read more, I've added a link in the sidebar to one of my favorite sites (Psychiatric Times) where you can begin.
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Good on you. Well done. It was great to read what you had shared about how long it took you and then having to re-write. I am learning to creative write and it so different from academic writing.
ReplyDeleteYep, I am re-writing a book...don't know how I could write over 50,000 words but I have. Simply long winded I guess.
It's exciting though. Yet with everyone forever in and out to see me, I am having a sabatical from thinking. In Gods time it will happen. Your friend sounded wonderful! I could picture him. At Uni I got my highest marks in Philosophy I found it the most interesting subject of all.
When he and I began rewriting our book, it ended up being a larger project than the initial version. But it's better for it and I'm glad we did it in the long run. I wondered at times how we'd manage it and finally it occurred to me we were writing a series of term papers -- that made it manageable! :-)
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