Dairy of a Madman

The human species has spent several hundred thousand years sorting through which emotions and marginal neuroses to keep under control and which to release. Now, with a keyboard, people overnight are “free” to unburden and unhinge themselves continuously and exponentially. One researcher quotes the entry-page of a teenage girl’s blog: “You are now entering my world. My pain. My mind. My thoughts. My emotions. Enter with caution and an open mind.”
- Daniel Henninger, OpinionJournal, “Disinhibition Nation”

Henninger makes a few salient points, most of which are about the new lack of repression that has come with the blogging age. Hell, I’m guilty of it myself; I’ve used this space for self-therapy more than once. Last night, in fact. If no one wants to read about my insanity, then there are plenty of other sites (and growing!) that they can surf instead of mine; and I’ve gotten some good feedback from both friends and strangers, not just about issues involving my bipolar disorder but my writing, my music, my life.

A large chunk of the article deals with something that I see as a false connection: the use of language. Language — I’m in the realm of the four-letter-plus variety — has been getting looser and freer as I’ve grown older, and I clearly remember a time before microwave ovens, MTV, remote control and home computing, much less blogs. The fact that you’re apt to hear “fuck” has less to do with blogging and a freedom from the constraints of face-to-face society and more to do with a sign of the times, I think.

Though my elders would just blame that on the fact that I run with a bad crowd. So there’s that possibility, too.

I do think the anonymity of the Internet is propelling us toward a darker time, at least socially. Blogs are a big part of this, with their loosening of the shackles of conventional behavior. Even someone like myself — with a full name, photo, and contact information attached to their every word, without the need for sleuthing — remains anonymous to a large extent. Even taking these words at face value, assuming that I’m not a big act or charade or exercise of writing (much less brilliantly executed AI with a sense of humor), you still don’t know me, any more than you know Al Franken or Stephen King or any other writer, famous or not.

And that knowledge, especially for those who are not so real-world bridged to their blogs, allows people to be whoever they want to be, or worse, whoever they think people want them to be. Look at blogs and the “half-naked thursday” meme (if you haven’t seen it, click around, and you’ll bump into it soon enough), or just about any MySpace page. More and more identities online are becoming a part of the popularity race.

Has this bled over into the waking world? I might be in the wrong age group to answer that, as I was in my pre-teens when hacking and personal computers and War Games were all the rage, and just out of college in the early nineities when getting online was finally a possibility for the masses. I can draw a hard line between my parents’ generation and my baby sister’s, with me and most of my peers sitting uncomfortably on the edge of one side or the other.

I think certain behaviors are changing, though I won’t make a better/worse judgement call on them. More and more communication is taking place in email, which is a huge plus for me. The world, in some sense, is opening up before us; ten years ago, I had a broad base of connections and contacts throughout Birmingham, but not much further, unless friends had moved away; now I have a network that crosses continents, all thanks to bulletin boards and forums. I even met Kasey online — she’s largely a homebody, and I doubt we ever would have crossed paths without the Internet.

But I think we’re also starting to see an isolation among people, sort of an electronic retardation of social skills. Face to face encounters look different to me, as a long-time observer of people; Friday and Saturday nights in the bar don’t really look anything like they did when I was in my early 20’s, for all the surface similarities. Maybe that’s just me getting older and grizzled, but I don’t think so; not yet, at least. More and more, though, I feel like I’m watching a bunch of home-schooled bubble children let out into society for the first time, dealing with other humans with the techniques they picked up from The Real World and Jackass.

We’re definitely, as Henninger points out, becoming more and more of a warts-and-all world, at least those of us that open up like this online. And I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing. On the one hand, the more we open up, no matter in what medium, the more that honesty is encouraged between people. On the other, there’s a desensitization to the ugly things in the world that comes with being human: the more you are exposed to something that is distasteful, be it language, gory movies, naked women, death — whatever the thing is, you grow numb to it.

It can’t possibly be good that what used to be too much information is now considered a tasty hors d’ouerve. Eventually, the search for greater stimulation leads to the edge of morality: the sadist eventually goes from fantsy to hurting someone to get his kicks. The cat torturer becomes the serial killer. It’s addiction; you up the dosage until the craving is satisfied. Look at extreme sports, or porn, or any number of escapist rituals available to us, and track how they’ve (d)evolved over the past ten, twenty, hundred years. It’s not hard to see.

But what is the presumed “natural conclusion” that I’m hinting at? Where does this tangled path of anonymity and fantasy and showing the world your most naked (perceived) self lead? An even more complicated question, when you consider all the other factors and variables at work in the equation, the progression of other areas of the world, the changing times in which we live, the polarization of the haves and have nots…

…

This is point at which I pause, reread what I’ve written, realize that I’m headed toward a really bad headache (or, at the very least, a lengthy post that wanders so far from the topic that I can’t possibly bring it full circle), decide that I’m not having nearly enough drunken conversations about philosophy with my regulars, and finally settle on the good idea of turning off my computer and heading somewhere that sells alcohol.