The internet and you... and me

Again, one thought leads to several completely different ones. I was sitting in the doctor's office the other day, thumbing through a MacLeans magazine. My eye was caught by the headline: A Winnipegger's death goes unnoticed for two years. Thank his computer. It seems Jim Sulkers' death was not discovered for almost two years, partly because his monthly pension cheques were automatically deposited to his bank account, and all his bills were automatically paid the same way.

The article goes on to talk about the impacts of new technologies, including the internet, on society. It mentions two studies that seem to show that "frequent Internet use leads to a decline in social support, family communication and the size of one's social network, and an increase in depression and loneliness." That, however, is a broad sweeping statement that dramatically oversimplifies the results of the studies. One of them, the Home Net Project, found that people who used the internet for entertainment actually experienced less depression. It was people who used the internet primarily as a means of interpersonal communication that experienced the above symptoms.

This strikes me rather like the brouhaha about Dungeons and Dragons in the eighties. There were several widely reported incidents in which people who were avid D&D players  committed crimes, or suicide, and the game was said to have been a factor. Next thing you knew, everybody was up in arms saying that D&D caused psychological problems in teens. Do an internet search today, and you will still find web sites devoted to the eradication of the game. After everybody calmed down, and some actual scientific studies were conducted, it was found that taking an otherwise normal and well adjusted teen, and exposing him or her to the Dungeons and Dragons game had absolutely no deleterious effects. The fact was that the fantasy/role-playing nature of the game simply attracted a certain type of people, many of whom had a less than solid grip on reality to start with. It was the troubled teens who gravitated to D&D, not the game that caused the  teens' troubles.

Fast forward to the twenty-first century, and we have this wonderful technology that allows us to communicate with people all over the world. Not only that, but it allows us to do it in a completely anonymous fashion. In fact, not only can we disguise our identity, we can create a completely imaginary one. We can pretend to be anything: an airline pilot on a dating service, a thirteen year old girl in a chat room, a cancer patient in an online journal. It is the mask I mentioned in a previous entry, that lets us be something different, something more than we are. It's the Polyjuice Potion of the computer world, that gives us the confidence to take chances we normally would have shrunk from. So is the internet creating a whole generation of depressed, anti-social misfits, or are the depressed, anti-social misfits simply flocking to the internet because of its safety? Because of its mask value? Mothers, watch your children.