Our impulse to confess via cyberspace inverts much of what we think about honesty. It used to be that if you wanted to know someone — to really know and trust them — you arranged a face-to-face meeting. Our culture still fetishizes physical contact, the shaking of hands, the lubricating chitchat.
....As more and more of our daily life moves online, we could find ourselves living in an increasingly honest world, or at least one in which lies have ever more serious consequences. Bush himself can't put old statements about W.M.D. behind him partly because so many people are forwarding his old speeches around on e-mail or posting them on Web sites. With its unforgiving machine memory, the Internet might turn out to be the unlikely conscience of the world. Part of my fascination with writing on the Internet, with blogging, is that I am creating a document of my life in the context of world events, popular culture, etc., on a daily basis in a public setting. Yet the abstraction of sitting anywhere a computer will go, alone with one's thoughts, interacting directly with only a machine, makes it easy to believe that one is really only talking to oneself, with some kind of invisible gallery looking on.
I am all for the honestly aspect of the Internet, but that which makes us open and honest, uninhibited even, also contributes to the virulence of our disputes. We would do well to remind ourselves that there are real people beyond the words and symbols we see on out computer screens.
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