Soupir
12-16-03, 01:17 PM
Remember when the only way you could get a word to your girlfriend at college was to write a letter on paper? Remember where you were when the term "instant message" came into daily use? How about the first time you fired up IRC or Yahoo! chat? It's been an amazing couple of decades. Suddenly the world is a lot smaller. With the newfangled internet demanding our attention through email, chat, cell phones and sciforums.com, our online persona is constantly in demand as well.
Enter the handle.
The Science of the Handle
Webster's third definition of handle is actually a: title 8 b : name; also : nickname. With handle so defined, I'd like to elaborate a moment with a manufactured scenario. Enter Joe Internet. His first introduction to this wonder of phone lines and protocols is primarily anonymous. Indeed, you can surf from here to Google.com without a squeak of personal information or value lost. I can peruse the net for hours and download movies, images, documents and programs without so much as a hello how are you. To be sure, part of the internet is handshakes and identification, and though my computer may be a regular at Yahoo.com, my name, my personality, my life certainly isn't.
Then introduce Joe Internet to the chatroom. To the message board, even. Suddenly the Internet, this wonder of anonymity, is calling for a name, a face, a person. At first Joe may be giddy enough to enter his own information. But usually we balk at introducing ourselves to the world that is the internet, for surely it is possible for any man within reach of a computer to read these very words - to know me past my anonymous mouse clicks and secure web purchases.
That's about when Joe Internet imagines a handle - that name he trusts with all his hopes, dreams, and fears. It's that warm fuzzy cloak they drape themselves in when walking the dangerous and sometimes rainy streets of the information highway. The handle is therefore universal, being that extra puff of protection the human psyche desires . . . especially at the realization of such a wild and fantastical dream as the internet. Propose it to Chief Joseph, Ben Franklin, or Einstein a place in your house where you could sit down and be connected from the Netherlands to Nova Scotia in the blink of an eye (or 10 blinks on a 56k).
What does this result in? We have a fascinating live example of this science right here before us at sciforums.com. Do I really need to illustrate? There are some prodigious characters here. Take Sir Loone. Look past, for a moment, his frequent and often ineffective references to the Bible. His bold and unashamed statement of values, beliefs, and the damnation of souls who don't live them. Who can he be, really? What face, what soul are you imagining sits at his keyboard, points to sciforums and starts attacking the naysayers of God? Can you imagine it? It seems difficult. And why the name Sir Loone? Do you doubt for a moment the potential that Sir Loone could be anything from a 15 year-old girl in Macon, Georgia, to a 35 year-old minister in the deserts of Utah? Do you doubt it? Andrew Brown wrote once,
Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life.
Whoever and wherever Sir Loone is or claims to be, his online persona is different from his person. It takes some practice, some patience, and some courage to make your online soul as similar and sensitive as your real-world soul. And even then, we sigh comfortably in the breathing room a handle affords - after all, when I type an instant message, when I post a thread, I'm not giving away anything except this handle, and it doesn't mean anything to you. I'm safe. *whew* Even if tassia or Godless or Tony1 were to descend upon my subject and wreck it to pieces, I could conceivably shut down my computer, walk out the door, and sit on the grass watching the moon rise. I would be okay.
The Effects of the Handle
What does this mean? To whatever varying degree you employ your online persona to fetch information, to post epic debates, to argue and flirt in a chatroom, do we lose a little of ourselves? At what point do we desire a mouse in our hand over the hand of a real person? At what point does the hum of our processor fan become that much more soothing than the buzz of conversation at the party down the street? We're giving away a lot less at the feet of our tower case.
This may have been impacted by indications that the people who surf the longest are those introverted individuals who talked rarely in high school and distanced themselves from others. But that argument, surely, loses its validity in the wake of this explosion in internet use and phenomena by the masses. Here at www.sciforums.com you may stumble upon real people who aren't the least bit afraid of posting their hearts and minds to the message boards of the world. But there are some who seem a little too outrageous, or who seem to possess a single human emotion, an extreme and odd affinity for expressing it at every opportunity. That may just be a real person employing a safe and imagined persona.
What are we losing? What are we gaining? What are your thoughts? Why do we hide behind handles? And those of use who don't, what makes you step out of the shadow and be real without any fear?
Enter the handle.
The Science of the Handle
Webster's third definition of handle is actually a: title 8 b : name; also : nickname. With handle so defined, I'd like to elaborate a moment with a manufactured scenario. Enter Joe Internet. His first introduction to this wonder of phone lines and protocols is primarily anonymous. Indeed, you can surf from here to Google.com without a squeak of personal information or value lost. I can peruse the net for hours and download movies, images, documents and programs without so much as a hello how are you. To be sure, part of the internet is handshakes and identification, and though my computer may be a regular at Yahoo.com, my name, my personality, my life certainly isn't.
Then introduce Joe Internet to the chatroom. To the message board, even. Suddenly the Internet, this wonder of anonymity, is calling for a name, a face, a person. At first Joe may be giddy enough to enter his own information. But usually we balk at introducing ourselves to the world that is the internet, for surely it is possible for any man within reach of a computer to read these very words - to know me past my anonymous mouse clicks and secure web purchases.
That's about when Joe Internet imagines a handle - that name he trusts with all his hopes, dreams, and fears. It's that warm fuzzy cloak they drape themselves in when walking the dangerous and sometimes rainy streets of the information highway. The handle is therefore universal, being that extra puff of protection the human psyche desires . . . especially at the realization of such a wild and fantastical dream as the internet. Propose it to Chief Joseph, Ben Franklin, or Einstein a place in your house where you could sit down and be connected from the Netherlands to Nova Scotia in the blink of an eye (or 10 blinks on a 56k).
What does this result in? We have a fascinating live example of this science right here before us at sciforums.com. Do I really need to illustrate? There are some prodigious characters here. Take Sir Loone. Look past, for a moment, his frequent and often ineffective references to the Bible. His bold and unashamed statement of values, beliefs, and the damnation of souls who don't live them. Who can he be, really? What face, what soul are you imagining sits at his keyboard, points to sciforums and starts attacking the naysayers of God? Can you imagine it? It seems difficult. And why the name Sir Loone? Do you doubt for a moment the potential that Sir Loone could be anything from a 15 year-old girl in Macon, Georgia, to a 35 year-old minister in the deserts of Utah? Do you doubt it? Andrew Brown wrote once,
Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life.
Whoever and wherever Sir Loone is or claims to be, his online persona is different from his person. It takes some practice, some patience, and some courage to make your online soul as similar and sensitive as your real-world soul. And even then, we sigh comfortably in the breathing room a handle affords - after all, when I type an instant message, when I post a thread, I'm not giving away anything except this handle, and it doesn't mean anything to you. I'm safe. *whew* Even if tassia or Godless or Tony1 were to descend upon my subject and wreck it to pieces, I could conceivably shut down my computer, walk out the door, and sit on the grass watching the moon rise. I would be okay.
The Effects of the Handle
What does this mean? To whatever varying degree you employ your online persona to fetch information, to post epic debates, to argue and flirt in a chatroom, do we lose a little of ourselves? At what point do we desire a mouse in our hand over the hand of a real person? At what point does the hum of our processor fan become that much more soothing than the buzz of conversation at the party down the street? We're giving away a lot less at the feet of our tower case.
This may have been impacted by indications that the people who surf the longest are those introverted individuals who talked rarely in high school and distanced themselves from others. But that argument, surely, loses its validity in the wake of this explosion in internet use and phenomena by the masses. Here at www.sciforums.com you may stumble upon real people who aren't the least bit afraid of posting their hearts and minds to the message boards of the world. But there are some who seem a little too outrageous, or who seem to possess a single human emotion, an extreme and odd affinity for expressing it at every opportunity. That may just be a real person employing a safe and imagined persona.
What are we losing? What are we gaining? What are your thoughts? Why do we hide behind handles? And those of use who don't, what makes you step out of the shadow and be real without any fear?