"Crunchy friends in a liquid broth..." - or LJ, as it's otherwise known...

[chaletian]

In the wake of the Strikethrough 2007 schemozzle, I seem to have seen at least half a dozen newspaper articles about the freakishness of people on the internet. Not related to LJ, just other things. YouTube, MySpace, people stalking other people, setting up fake Facebook accounts, all kinds of things. And what strikes me about the people who write these articles is that they none of them seem to have any comprehension of what internet communities are about and how they work. They no doubt use the internet: email their friends, book their holidays, shop, download music, all the usual stuff. But I would bet that none of them *engage* in the internet in the way that we do. They do not understand that internet communities are, in a way, a separate subculture, in which social rules vary from those in the Real World, and this lack of understanding leads them to interpret, in so very many cases, internet community users as freaks and weirdos who need to get a life. Pah.

Comments

[morganmuffle]

Did you by any chance see the genius one on the BBC that pretty much said "these freaks even mourn people online, what's that all about!" Because I may have finally snapped and commented.

There's a guy who set up a facebook on there too and again it's clear that he has no idea what he's talking about. Obviously the reporting has to come from the outside but a little research would show them that a community is a community whether off- or online.

But then people who like science and/or technology are geeks and we don't need to be nice to them.

[megaleena.livejournal.com]

Web 2.0 RULZ FTW!