Online images

I'm repeating what someone else blogged about (sorry, can't remember who or I'd link you!) - but it's amazing how you form an image of someone you meet online, and yet they can be so completely different in person.

There are those who conveniently include a picture of themselves on their blog - so you get a fair idea of what they look like. There are others who perhaps are wise not to.... :)

After 3 weeks in blogland I'm starting to recognize names across various sites and comments. We seem to move in the same circles. Personalities are being revealed and probably automatically shoved into appropriate boxes by my overworked brain. Same overworked brain conjures up a picture of an appropriate face to stick on the box too.

And yet, should I run into these familiar names on the street I don't think I'd recognize them. I might be very surprised by their in-person face, personality, mannerisms. I might not like them in real life, though I enjoy their company online.

Perhaps all these people I think I know are really just my computer generating words and random thoughts? Perhaps they don't even really exist!

Perhaps the thing we call the internet, the connections we make, is really just some huge big mega-whopper of a computer, programmed to produce online people that we get to know, fall in love with, battle against, quote or delete.

Perhaps I need to go get a cup of coffee.....