After the comment about the child I'd have agreed to meet him in person. In some dark secluded romantic spot, perhaps near a swamp or a particularly deep and murky lake.

Yes, but there are two key differences between the work place/small town analogies and the situation that would be created by this proposed law.

1) In the former, there are some controls as to who's in and who's out. Not so much for an internet community. As we have seen, they can grow to staggering proportions rather quickly. Now, the easy rebuttal to that is that this law isn't putting your info out for all members to see, just the adminsitrators. But there you run smack into...

2) Lack of reciprocation. In the small town/work place situation, there's a bidirectionality. "You can know everything about me, I can know everything about you." Not so with this law. You'd be require to divulge info to the operators of whatever board, while they are under no obligation to return. Such one-sidedness makes it far easier for the less scrupulous operators to do less scrupulous things.

I'll grant you that - but I do still wonder if technology enable us to have that small town relationship in a much larger community. Of course there are psychologicaal and physiological barriers at some point - but the technology seems to at least enable things moving in this direction.

The other thing about technology is I wonder over time whether or not privacy is even possible. After I saw the movie The End of Violence, I became hyper aware of all the surviellance cameras there are just about everywhere you go. It's kind of big brotherish but we already spend an awful lot of time on camera, add the GPS feature on cell phones - red light cameras, IP address logging etc. maybe we should focus less on protecting our privacy and more on protecting our rights to be ourselves in public.

There has been research that seems to indicate that whether you live in a small community or a large metropolitan area, people tend to have close relationships with about the same number of people. It seems like we're more impersonal in big cities because you come across more people you don't know, but in the end, we all hit some maximum upper limit of social capaicty which is relatively stable (accounting for the expected statistical distribution of individual variations) from person to person. So while the internet may offer the advantage of widening the georgraphical net of who you know, it most likely just means that other acquaintances will fall off the table, or never get on the table to begin with.

Shhh!!!! Don't say her name ! ;)

Call her 'Kindly tall woman of tangly red hair'.

I hear the number is somewhere between 200 and 250 - I've notice that that also seems to be the breaking point for online communities - factions are created, splits occure, or cyber neighborhoods of specialization are carved out. Happens in the work place too.

But still there has to be some impact of having access to the same information on strangers that you have with your intimates. I just hope as we move forward it becomes more comfortable or easier to just be who you are instead of having to conceal things for fear of judgemental idiots, stalkers, and critics.

The Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh


Yeah, maybe I'm tired, but that was my first thought.

If we achieve step one of living without fear of them, what's to be done in step two about the inevitable idiots, stalkers and critics?


(ok, mostly about the stalkers ... assuming no murky lakes are available)

Good question - it may involve living with and accepting the fact that there are cretins among us. But perhaps these same tools can be used to curb their otherwise anti-social behavior in something I shall dub "meta-stalking" for stalking couldn't be done in secret anymore either.

oh kindly tall lady of tangly hair, won't you please tell us next of the Laidly Toad of Bamborough Keep?