News updates: Jenny is fine, Frieda is fine, she got my card, everyone's fine, everything is fine. I'm fine, too. I just haven't been updating this with the clocklike regularity I used to maintain, so some people sent out a digital posse for me to ask what's up.
Someone on the mailing list I am on, the one about people who have diaries online, came up with the idea of doing a fictional online journal. You know, fictional characters, perhaps set in the future or past, or in some other place. Someone asked, "well, how would you know it was fictional unless they told you?" The comment was made that it's strange, but in print, we assume "journal-like" books are probably fictional unless we are told otherwise, and online, we assume that they're real unless we're told otherwise. There was one exception that someone raised: one guy apparently writes a fictional journal set on some other planet in the year 3500 or something like that. I guess that would be pretty obvious.
I started to think about all the other diaries I read, and I had to admit, there's really no way to know that the events you read about there are really "real," or whether someone is embellishing their life a little or even making the whole thing up out of the air. You don't even know the people who post them are "real."
That got me musing about what makes something "real" online. What is "real" here? If someone presents information to us, presents feelings to us, and we have no way to or even any interest in verifying that these actual events happened to that actual living human person, have we accepted the "reality" of it? I think so. We trust what seems real and at the same time it's not vital to us if it ends up that the whole thing was a fake, a roman-a-clef. It's just someone's life, and if we don't know that person or are not a character in it, it doesn't really matter, and we just say, "heck, it's as real as anything."
The same could not be said of web sites which present more critical content, perhaps information about prescription drugs or how to make your own dynamite. In those cases, we want to be pretty darn sure that the information is factual, complete and accurate and presented by someone whose authority and knowledge of the subject can be ascertained. I'd feel pretty dumb if I visited a "do your own brain surgery" page and found out later it was all made up by a fourth-grade class in Texas.
Evan came over after rehearsal tonight and we made some crepes and sat around on the floor eating and watching television. He agreed with me about accepting things online as real when they don't involve factual topics. We're more likely to accept opinions and feelings without the need to tie them to a face, a name, an address, a physical body. I think that's one of the things I like about keeping these pages: you can choose to look at the parts of my life I present, or you can hit BACK and go somewhere else, and I never know that I've been rejected. In return, you can feel like you're looking in on me without feeling guilty about invading my privacy.
There's that girl, Jennie, who apparently has a camera in her room hooked up to the Internet, and it's on all the time? Public Radio did a story about it a couple of weeks ago, and I realized that I could never do something like that (this Jennie apparently has posted pictures of herself while dressing, and who knows what else) because I would feel that I'm losing the control over what part of me you are given. I'd have to modify the way I live rather than simply turn off the feed. That doesn't seem right. I admire that she (and apparently some other people) can do this, but I couldn't.
I suppose a FargoCam would be pretty interesting, but I don't know how I'd keep it on his head. Evan suggested duct-taping it. Frankly, most of the shots would be of either the wall, the floor, or his own behind. Life here is just a thrill a minute.
I always enjoy your comments. It's been a while since anyone left any.