Indeed, the axiom that machines never forget is built into the very format of e-mail — consider that many e-mail programs automatically ''quote'' your words when someone replies to your message. Every day, my incoming
e-mail reminds me of the very words I wrote yesterday, last week or even months ago. It's as if the gotcha politics of Washington were being brought to bear on our everyday lives. I.e, Ken Layne's famous challenge to the mainstream media and the world at large: "We will fact check your ass."
- it's not only the fear of electronic exposure that drives us to tell the truth. There's something about the Internet that encourages us to spill our guts, often in rather outrageous ways. Psychologists have noticed for years that going online seems to have a catalytic effect on people's personalities. The most quiet and reserved people may become deranged loudmouths when they sit behind the keyboard, staying up until dawn and conducting angry debates on discussion boards with total strangers. You can usually spot the newbies in any discussion group because they're the ones WRITING IN ALL CAPS — they're tripped out on the Internet's heady combination of geographic distance and pseudo-invisibility.
One group of psychologists found that heated arguments — so-called flame-war fights, admittedly a rather fuzzy category — were far more common in online discussion boards than in comparable face-to-face communications.
This certainly would appear to confirm Mac Diva's point about introvert's feeling more comfortable on the Internet - who knows what some of our more spirited and even contentious commenters are like in real life?
- it has become a vast arena for collective therapy — for a mass outpouring of what we're thinking and feeling. I spend about an hour every day visiting blogs, those lippy Web sites where everyone wants to be a pundit and a memoirist. (Then I spend another hour writing my own blog and adding to the cacophony.) Stripped of our bodies, it seems, we become creatures of pure opinion.
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