Certain classes of us move around, and for maybe 600 million there’s a wider social pool afforded by the Internet (although interactions are limited in range). That said, we use these technologies to present ourselves with as much or little nakedness and vulnerability as we used to in person. It’s just a new medium, and therefore, in transition, we notice what we’ve always done and see it as new.

I think mediated relationship-building is both richer and more impoverished than the face-to-face model. There’s lower barrier to modeling new modes of being, so we can be eternal teenagers exploring avatars of ourselves. On the other hand, the disjointedness of this can cause loneliness and put us in closer contact with the question – Who are we, and why?

To draw on one more interesting perspective in relation to online fandom, and especially to the previous post about Surya Yalamanchili’s post on fan types based from his own observations from The Apprentice, I was intrigued by some recent thoughts…