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Manners

Internet manners. Real-life manners. Who do manners impact the most? The person enacting them, or not. Having manners instills a sense of pride in oneself. Having restraint, tact and decorum are necessary when presenting oneself. The problem with the internet is that one has no means of gauging other reactions and little initiative to care what people will think since with all probability they will never know who is reading their stuff.

So I think about this a lot. Should I invest my time in participating in web forums? are my journals right? Is the content suitable for the internet? What a laugh. Anything is suitable for the internet. There are no rules here. My words are going from this tiny keypad through aether to who knows where. The only feedback I get is penile enlargement spam and letters from Al Kharat of Saudi Arabia asking me to donate money in lieu of his assassinated son. I am talking to no one here. There is nothing here. And yet everyone is here now. Everyone's paying attention to the imaginary world that we make ourselves, devoid of tact and manners and restraint. I think of the things I say on the Internet and I know I couldn't in real life -- though I have to defend this journal: it is right for me and I have no problem with people reading it -- and I wonder where we should draw the line. Everything is so amateurish and there's too much information, too much to see and do. I try to do it all and I feel my life's getting sucked up in a vacuum cleaner. Wait a minute! How did all this happen? I wish I could go back to the beginning when we were all on 486's with dial-up and I did email rpg's and my website. That was super cool. But now there's weblogs and podcasts and hell I can take a picture with my phone and post it instantly to the internet but for heaven's sake why do I want to do that? Who wants to see a grainy blurry picture of whatever i'm looking at or my cat or my vacation photos? I can podcast over this phone too but who wants to hear me stammer inanely and anyway wouldn't I just die if someone I knew heard? Oh well I mean there's so much to do. There's no limit to it.

It forces me to draw back sharply and focus on what matters. There's so much that's there and it's free but when it comes to it my time's not free and I must decide on one thing and do it well. For now that's my weblogs. I don't really have time to read other people's weblogs unfortunately -- though I get an unbelievable amount of attention on MySpace considering I don't have any pictures of myself on there wearing nothing but duct tape.

We need to have manners and decorum. It will make us feel better about ourselves. For now I'm focusing on the basics and slimming down to merely what interests me and nothing more. Like with everything else, the Internet isn't what I would have chosen, like riding in airplanes or cars, or eating meat. Maybe some day I'll get over the fact that I wasn't born as Eve on the isle of the Blue Lagoon and can't make the world. Trying to make my microcosm in all of this seems nigh on impossible sometimes and that goes for everything.

Sent from Amanda's Treo @-'-,--

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