On the other hand, there are many things you know about me that do not often get
worked into casual conversation.
More accurately, there are many things YOU HAVE SAID ABOUT YOURSELF that do not often get worked into casual conversation. Personally, I don't know any of them. I know you have said you were on "It's Academic." But were you really? I have no idea. I have no reason either to doubt you or to believe you. While the same may be true of acquaintances to whom you say that, they at least will have the benefit of body languge, tone of voice, etc. to help them determine whether you are being honest or have created a fantasy world. Likewise, they are likely to have some record of whether you have been generally honest or duplicitous with them in the past.
Since we here know neither your nor your wife's real name, there is no chance that we could recognize those names in the local papers even if we read those. So there, your local acquaintances also have at least a potential edge on us.
To go back to the fantasy world for a moment, the limited work I have done in recovered memory (I had a case several years ago which involved recovered memory, so I did some reading on it then) makes clear that people can create memories that are to them every bit as real as memories of events that actually happened to them. They can pass lie detector tests, can be very convincing, because they really believe that those things happened to them. Sociologists have been able to plant memories in children of things that never happened, but that to the children become totally real. A study of brain wave activitity shows that the brain wave memories of "actually happened" events and invented events are indistinguishable. The brain has stored them both identically, so that to the person, they are equally real.
So you may really physically appeared on It's Academic. Or, you may have just wanted to so badly that over the years you have persuaded yourself that you did, and have created a memory of it that is not just as real to you as it would be if you had actually physically appeared there.
There clearly are people using SI to create personas which are quite different from their real persons (or at least I hope so!) I go back to Beltane as an obvious example, where some quite respectable people publicly fantasized about their participation in a totally made up world, suggesting that they were doing things that they would never do in real life.
Or look at when a poster on SI (no, not Poet) came out of the blue to harrass me about something, and I responded by creating out of whole cloth a fictional romantic relationship with them as a preferential response to engaging in a flame war. Make love, not war, as it were. It was recognised as fantasy by all the SI posters who knew me, and guessed at soon enough by most others, but a few who didn't know me became offended because they were unable to distinguish between 3D life and Walter Mitty life.
The internet is an open invitation to Walter Mitty lives. Anyone who participates here under any other illusion is likely to get in trouble here sooner or later. |
