[webtv]

The openess the internet creates within people is something I have always found strange ever since I was first exposed to social media platforms. For example, many people I follow use their accounts to post about family deaths or other deeply personal/familial issues. In the real world, most people would not openly mourn to a group of strangers  you hardly know, but the comfort and perceived anonymity of the internet gives these people solace. I don't hold any judgement to people who are so open to strangers on the internet- to each their own- but I don't understand how people can be so open online to some people they have never met or gauged in real life. Odd.

Isn't this the oddest paradox? That platform which is, on one level, increasingly the most visible and circulatory thing in the developed world is seen as more intimate and private than your own household, bedroom, maybe even your own head. Let's take it even to that extreme: how many people post things to potentially dozens, hundreds, thousands of witnesses that they otherwise wouldn't admit to themselves? 

On some level, it's as if we haven't fully accepted how consequentially 'real' the internet is, how rife with actual resonance it really is. Of course, we often realize this in pieces--that uncanny cause and effect between what we do in this weird feverscape and how it affects all other offline realms of life--and then this feeds back into what we do online. 

But yeah, I wonder if our willingness to divulge our deepest reaches of conscious being to not merely the public, but on a far less popularly-aware level, to data-mining megacorps and predatory third parties, stems from that sense that the Online space is taking place in our heads, within ourselves, and so of course it must be safe. Sort of like if you did DMT and expected the machine elves to politely keep your secrets, maybe even from you, along with those of the cosmos, beyond whatever glimpse you get, because they were confined to only your head anyway. But the web is then like waking up the next day only to realize that everyone else who did DMT that night also saw your shamefullest shortcoming grafitti'd everywhere in city squares across the globe, skywritten, broadcasted on car radios, etc. I don't think people even wholly understand so much of what or why they do online what they do and say and share online. We're just tweaking, tripping so much of the time.