Bunch of invincibles

I am going to ruffle a few feathers through this post. Not that I always want to differ with everyone, but I definitely beg to differ with the general opinion here on VR.

Some of you have cited instances - touching ones - of people who they hadnt met/seen helping them like no *real* person would, who they confide to although they havent met them in person, and suchlike. Well, how does that make the *relationship* itself more real? That the so-called real people are less friendly is a sweeping statement. IMO, it is really upto the individual if s/he wants to go out of the way and help others. Virtuality has nothing to do with it. That people are willing to confide to a friend they met online is actually understandable because this whole virtual medium provides you an anonymity and a safe cucoon to unleash your feelings. Why else do we have some people with fake names here on BUF? Not many, but there are some I am sure. Its a matter of individual choice and none of my business but this is the very reason why this whole system of friendship over net/blog/orkut/whatever is virtual and wonderful. As I said before, reality is all about perceptions. Virtual media dont always give you a representative perception, and no relationship can be real without a representative perception. I had blogged about internet chats long back here. A scientific (and seemingly funny) explanation that I came up with at that time was:

"If a human body is an isolated system - which is a reasonable assumption - its entropy will always increase according to the second law of thermodynamics. In other words, humans cannot hold things within themselves beyond a point. They are always looking to give vent to these 'things'. And from the second law of thermodynamics, we know that we need gradients to make things flow. Internet chatroom is one such gradient-inducer - which the real world might not necessarily provide!"

Dont get me wrong, I am not demeaning the feelings people have for unseen faces. People behind those firewalls are real, and the way they feel for co-firewallers are just like the way they would feel in real life and there is nothing fake about it. All I am saying is these feelings are a by-product of novelty that the so-called virtual media provide, and hence they might be based on unrealism. Indeed, some people go on to make great friends after meeting their so-called net-friends, but we arent talking of virtual-turned-real friends. No matter how many megabytes of emails you have exchanged with a person, that first real meeting is much more than many gigabytes of texts.

If I were to die today - ok I know I am superyoung but let's assume a smoking hot blonde outrages my modesty and kills me - at max I would receive some email reminders from BUF admin asking me to explain my sudden absence. Beyond that, no one would care and know nothing and understandably so because by design, virtual medium keeps you away from reality. Real world doesnt.