It's a Beautiful Day for a RANT

Time to cut loose, let the hair down, a bit. Fridays roll around too quickly; I can tell I'm a gettin' old.

So I've had this topic rolling around in the head a while. I hate even to address it, because then that means I have to admit a fundamental horror.

I am affected, not immune.

So, what's the topic? Blogging, and Ownership.

OK, so here's the deal. Somewhere along the evolutionary pathway, we evolved abstract reasoning. To have object constancy. To be able to paint non-physical realities in our minds and operate from them.

And what happens is: the more our minds interdigitate into virtual worlds, the more those worlds become our functional reality.

I suppose it started with object constancy, and plain ol' hearing. We figured if we could still hear something, but not see it, it still existed. A predator slinking behind a boulder, that sort of thing. Soon, if we saw it, then didn't, we also realized it was still real, but out of sight. Even if we didn't hear it. And then, if someone told us there was a predator behind the boulder, but we had neither seen it nor heard it, we learned to believe them.

Yada, yada, yada, skip to the modern Industrial Revolution and inventions like the telegraph, then radio, then television, and, finally, the Internet. Each of these mediums provided us a stream of data describing a reality we could not sense with any of our physical senses, but that was real in some other location or realm. So, we acclimated to realities that we could not actually experience.

But then, as is our twisted nature, we started tweaking reality, for manipulative purposes (Pun wasn't intended, but it's pretty good, isn't it?). Presenting false realities, as entertainment - things like that. We acclimated to those as well, and some of us were not discerning enough to realize they were false realities. Soon, we would swallow any reality presented to us in virtual form, and subconsciously take it in, as reality, but somewhere else.

And a funny sort of evolutionary thing happened. We began to internalize these virtual realities. We began to fantasize that they were, indeed, our realities. That we were party to them, and had ownership. Sometimes we felt the distance, between our actual world and our virtual reality. But we convinced ourselves that we could adjust, adapt, will, control, until we would eventually actualize those realities. It will happen, if only... Ergo endless re-runs of The Parent Trap. Every broken-home kid felt if they watched it enough times, something magical would eventually happen, and their own painful life would resolve from fragmentation. If only...

And yet another step, too. We not only internalized these realities - whether they were real somewhere else, or manipulated versions of something actually real, or just plain fabricated - we began to act on them. We turned our actual realities into a function of that virtual reality.

Classic example is the relationship the pathetic woman enters with the felon behind bars, who tells her anything she wants to hear, to manipulate her. She goes on to marry him when he's paroled, and we read the story of her murder in the paper, six months later.

Nowadays it's the meeting or dating over the (wireless, LOL!) wires, the Internet. We are so convinced of the presented realities we believe in, we do drastic, life-changing alterations to our actual realities, to meld our actual realities into the fantasy virtual reality.

Another example in the news lately is Baby Grace, the dead toddler resulting from her mother moving in with a batterer. The mother had "met" and "fallen in love with" this abusive man over the Internet. The virtual reality in the mother's mind, about the man on the other end of the wires, was nothing like what actual reality turned out to be.

And, oooooooooh, the world of blogging.

On the blogger's end, we have this fantasy of a world of rapt readers, hanging on our every word, extracting our pearls of wisdom, reveling in our uniqueness. And we are beguiled into writing things that we would never externalize in our physical reality - baring our souls and thoughts, forgetting the actual exposure to which we are opening ourselves. We abnegate reality, and function in our magical bubble, where we can let loose with abandon, and it will feel so... therapeutic. It's indulgent.

The other side is just as disturbing: the readers. They follow us bloggers with integrated attention, internalizing us with each new entry. Before long, they "know" us, and all about us. Before long, they know better for us, than we know for ourselves. Before long, they must act on it, and presume to tell us what to do, how to be. To tell us what they know, about us, that we don't realize about our self. How they could improve - better manage - our reality.

Virtual realities are one area where we are seduced into denial. Denial that it isn't real, or may not be. Denial that what we want, how we paint the picture, may not be actual truth, or anything like it. Denial that words can have no cohesive meaning in reality, at all. Denial that we can't distinguish that which is real from that which isn't.

It's a scary phenomenon, if you think about it. The problem is most people don't want to think about it. They want to stream their virtual realities into their heads, without an actual reality check. They just want to accept what they think is offered, and do not want to do the work of thinking about it, critically, in active mode.

So all y'all. Guilty as charged, at times. I have to labor to remind myself of these things on a regular basis, and still fail many times.

But, at least I've thought about it.

Don't EVEN get me started on Second Life.

End Rant.

-The Traveler