If there's one thing I'm good at, it's
not being drawn into becoming a follower. I cannot be goaded, coaxed, or bought-off with psychological trinkets of "group participation".
Fundamentally... the internet is not about information, or sharing, or self-expression; it is not a lagniappe upon the sum of its participants; it is not a nice friendly place where we get the neighbours we desire instead of the family-from-hell which drives us to doubt the validity of the human race; it is, in fact, "not" a great many things.
But nor is it something which requires an "is" to define it (nor, we, by extension, ourselves).
One could say, with a glib smugness, that to a large degree it is
about anonymity, and (thanks to the EU) the right to be forgotten. There is much to be said whether Dante ever really "knew" his love
"Bice" Portinari or if her very absence from his normal existence gave him legitimate leave to trade places with Virgil and the poets of old, dooming us to view the Renaissance as some scholarly-logical medieval "parting gift".
Indeed, Nikos (with his allegorically large head - not dissimilar to Kunk's unfortunate afro-friz) are undermining (by their very visibility) all the benefits of
not possessing an avatar, never mind a visage-actuelle in "real life". Usually on Star Trek you have the "funny forehead" type of aliens... once, as I recall on The Next Generation, there was one alien who had no real form itself and always referred to humans as "ugly bags of mostly water" - which, of course, I thought was a fantastic way to describe and write off our failed biological lineage.
Thus, I have never aspired to be anything other than an ugly bag of mostly water. I save a fortune on hair-gel. (That said, there was a phase last year where I wanted to be Lord Voldemort, especially as he's not to be named [thus the next-best thing], but there's that whole thing with his nose...
)
You see how easily the vein twists from the serious to the frivolous based on nothing more than a discussion of pictures? Am I the only one to perceive this as an indicator of the greater threat posed by the alarming popularity of image-based reasoning on the internet opposing the figurative freedoms of learned and mindful abstraction?
Thus it is only reasonable that I would appear as yet another suitor in white, trudging with lantern bright upon the snow-dropped background of wide wintry fields filled to obscurity with manor-born brides with bouquets of the lightest Rose and Galanthus, surrounded by the heavy honour-guard of Clydesdale's best Draughts. Do you see me there? I'm the lad in the lower-left corner with the translucent tears falling from his wide clear eyes at the easy rise of lurid-reason over florid expression, bearing the death-knell of your visual world for all to see.
(You know, I figure if I keep at this tirade-against-the-surreal that I'm forced to express in conflict with the "ordinary" found so often discarded by the side of the road... one day, someone's actually going to "get it". I can but live and hope, and allow Fred to suffer lonesomely through the twisted prose of my amusements along the way.
)