"What about his position that posters aren't real?"
That is not his "position"...LOL!!! That is just phoney.
Not true.
Not real isn't necessarily the term I would use. Clearly there is a flesh and blood person (or else a computer that makes Deep Blue look like an amateur) benind each alias. (Or two or more people -- there is nothing to stop a pair or a group of people from sharing an alias.)
But I do maintain that posters here, especially those who post under aliases, are self-created constructs. The constructs may be closer to or further from the real person behind the posts, depending on a number of factors, including how much imagination the real person has and how much they value their privacy. But one can create here--or at least can try to create here--any persona they want to try out. A shoe salesman can claim to be a college professor. A woman can pretend to be a man, and vice versa. An 18 year old can claim to be a retired Boeing engineer. Other posters have no way to verify whether they are what they say they are or not, unless they choose to volunteer 3d information about themselves, and even then it may be wrong -- for example, Rambi posts links to columns she has written, and I believe her, but I also realize that those columns could be written by someone totally different and Rambi is really just a wanna-be columnist who is pretending to be this person. Same with Christopher Hodgkin -- the poster using that name could actually be the Christopher Hodgkin who's a lawyer in Washington, or he could be a disgruntled opposing party who is using that name to try to discredit the real Christopher Hodgkin who still uses a typewriter and has no idea his name is being plastered all over the internet.
It really is true that "on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." There have been plenty of stories of people pretending to be what they aren't -- high school kids pretenting to be big time investors, pedophile males pretending to be nice girls, etc. The point is, that nobody but the poster knows. The alias is a construct. And if someone is good, they can create and maintain for years a construct that has no connection at all with who they are in real 3d life.
In that sense, no poster here is real. Not a phoney argument -- simple truth. |
