The silent majority: July 13, 1998 issue of New Thinking

July 13, 1998 New Thinking:
The silent majority

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July 13, 1998

The silent majority

By Gerry McGovern

Would you prefer to be known or unknown?

Much is made today of email services such as Hotmail and the potential anonymity they give to their users. What about the people who want their names to be known but are shy and feel awkward communicating?

You could say that the Internet flattens all potential social barriers. It doesn’t matter if you have pimples. It doesn’t matter if you are awkward in face-to-face encounters. It doesn’t matter if you have very unusual interests. You can join a discussion group or enter a chat area and be an equal. You can put together your own website.

For certain people that is true. For others it is not.

Having pimples on the Internet is having bad grammar. Being awkward on the Internet is not being witty, not being good at putting your point across in writing.

The Internet has a lot of loud, articulate voices. (I suppose I’m one of them.) We’re quick to tell the world what we think the Internet is. We’re quick to tell the world what we want the Internet to remain. We’re an articulate bunch, so we are.

Other than ourselves, whom do we represent? Are our views representative of the broad mass of society? (The silent majority.) We focus on issues such as anonymity because we’re already known. Because there are times when we would prefer not to be known. (For those denied freedom of speech in their own country, of course, anonymity is essential in getting their views known.) Or perhaps we want anonymity because we have a number of personalities and selves that we want to express.

Do we represent the views of those who feel awkward at a keyboard, who freeze when they see a question on a screen? Somehow I doubt it. In fact, I think that many of the ‘players’ on the Internet feel that we represent far more people than we actually do.

I have a way of measuring complexity. The more people who are a part of something the more complex it becomes. In the early days, the Internet was a simple place. It had a small number of people and perhaps as importantly these people came from the same basic class and groupings; students, academics, etc. It was easy for simplistic ideas to sound universal then.

With every new person that enters the Internet the more complex it becomes. Why, when the majority of society is online, won’t the Internet be just as complex as offline society is today? To go a step further, when most of society is online won’t the Internet as an entity cease to exist and become another part of society?

The Internet is a wonderful thing. There is a view that it would be an even more wonderful, nirvana-like thing if only people and governments would stop messing it up.

But the Internet is cursed in having to deal with messy people for all eternity. It may give wings of heaven to the witty girl with pimples, but the boy awkward at the keyboard gets only from it feet of clay.

Gerry McGovern

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Having pimples on the Internet is having bad grammar.