UsernameEmailRegionInterestAOL IMICQ IDYahoo! IDMSN IDJabber

virtual personality
With all the communication devices and far reaches of technology, there is no excuse for not meeting people these days. Internet, mobile phones, pagers, text messaging, instant messaging, email, and regular mail all facilitate maximum communication, and through these devices, we take on our virtual personality. We can pretend to be anything ... an astronaut, a polititian, a decent person. But how much of our own personality actually seeps through when we are allowed to paint any picture we desire of ourselves? In painting such a picture, if we are not accurate, how can we expect to forge good relationships in dishonesty? In today's society, can we cut & paste a perfect life?

In my own experiences with meeting people face-to-face, I can usually tell in under a minute how well we're going to get on, if at all. In text messages and over high speed internet lines, however, it isn't as simple. When you're speaking directly to another person, you have to be focused and engaged in the conversation, which means that long pauses while figuring out how to glamorize those five years in the pen are not socially acceptable. However, online you have all the time in the world to craft your words to inspire, flatter, or mislead someone. And if, in fact, you choose to be dishonest, can you blame the other person for losing interest when they find out who you really are?

Of course there are those that will argue that technology has brought us closer together, not farther apart. We can talk to our kids about soccer practice while hiking in an Amazon jungle. We can have a job interview with someone in England while sitting at our computer in LA. Even so, one has to ask, as we move forward with technology, are we losing touch with reality? How far away from eachother do we need to be to feel truly connected?

In the world of virtual reality, we have to be careful where we step. Just because we can try anything, do anything, be anything doesn't necessarily mean we should. Forget networks crashing, bad connections and computer viruses ... the thing we really need to be concerned with is not losing touch with ourselves.