"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.