Monday 27 April 2009

BEDA the Twenty-Seventh:
Imagining People Complexly is Hard!

Hello Beard Racers!

Get the joke? Do you? Well congratulations on having read at least two of my blogs!

So recently I've been reading some of Alex Days older diaryland entries. (One of these days I will post a blog where I don't mention either him or John Green, and it's going to be epic.) They're all very personal, intimate, and at times, quite emotional, so I wasn't all together comfortable reading them at first. He has, however, recently said that he intends to publish them as a book in the future, so I'm feeling better about my apparent intrusion into his life.

He first started posting when he was 14, so understandably, they're quite embarrassing to read, especially after I realised that just under a year later I would follow in his exact footsteps. We both went through a phase of following the pagan religion Wicca, we both made close friends online, and we both overused smilies and the use of asterix to denote *activity*.

It's really quite an odd experience, though. I'm used to mature, intelligent, and informed adult Alex that we see in his videos and wherever else he [used to] post on the internet (especially as I only quite recently joined the Nermie Army). Now all of a sudden I'm seeing a side of him that I hadn't even begun to imagine, and it's very hard to not see the two as completely different people.
It's partly because he's obviously undergone quite a large change in the last six years, which is to be expected. It's puberty, we all do. However, he is still the same person, so I can only conclude that it's down to my failure to see Alex as anything more than the persona he presents us with.

Whilst I'm not shifting the blame away from me here, I think that this may really be the fault of the internet. Think about it. Just think of three people you only know on the internet, or if you don't have that many people you only know online, just imagine how you saw your friend the last time you chatted on MSN or Skype. I may well be wrong, but I'm guessing you can only construct an image of their personality from how they interact with you. (Feel free to pwn me in the comments if not, btw)

I guess it's just a problem inherent to both our natural settings, and the barrier that the internet creates between you and everyone else, and is something that can only really be changed by a conscious effort to remind ourselves that the idiot in the BlogTv waiting room complaining about how John won't respond to him, is as human and real as you are*.

Apologies if you have no idea who or what I'm talking about here.. Less esoteric blog posts resume again tomorrow, I promise.

Love you all!

xo
gb


*For the record, I'm not pretending this is my own original thinking at all. I fully credit that I have just taken the concepts provided by John Green and the DFW speech and applied them to the internet. Again, feel free to tell me to STFU in comments.

1 comment:

  1. I stumbled upon Hank's old blog/journal thing a few months ago, and it was insanely surprising. The entries went back to when he was in college, and his writing was very dark, extremely well-written at times, sometimes rambly and boring. So interesting.

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