Out of Line.

   Commuting via Public Transport provides the most common ground upon which we are forced to communicate directly with complete strangers.

   As I sit here there is a vacant seat separating a stranger and myself, his friend greets him and within a few seconds the friend proceeds to budge him up. The result was a 3-person bench, with 3 separate seats being occupied by 3 people, with one spare seat in the middle.

   Has interaction with unfamiliar people now reached the point where we dare not be within a foot of a stranger with any interaction whatsoever rendering the activator of such interaction a weirdo?

   The answer it seems is one of ambiguity. We do not regularly communicate, out of anything other than necessity, with people who we are not familiar with. If anything we avoid it, rendering us solitary for a healthy majority of our time.

   However, there is a completely contrasting line of evidence to this - the Internet. Over the past decade or so the Internet has provided a platform on which the majority of the world population are linked via a common platform.

   Social Networking gives everybody involved the opportunity to access anybody else. It also allows provides a platform for one to develop an image for themselves with the opportunity to manipulate this image. It allows us to attempt to hide or enhance any personal traits we possess that would be much harder to disguise in person.

   Whether or not this ability to fabricate a personality affects interpersonal relationships is unclear, though it is perfectly clear that there is a distinct difference between the way one reacts to a stranger online or in person.

   The person sat (not quite) next to me on the bench, along with his friend, with their fear of the unfamiliar are likely to have their own fabricated personalities somewhere within the online world. I would dare to suggest that they would have taken the more comfortable, logical seat, if it existed within a fabricated reality, in which they didn’t physically participate, they merely had to observe the situation and respond to it in their own time with every action considered prior to it being projected. Therefore, allowing them to come across exactly as they wish to come across.

   What gives us this sense of security? Why does one gain an air of confidence when communicating over a fabricated platform, from a remote location rather than face to face?

   Would the same person have sat beside me on that bench in the train station, in a time before the Internet was a central figure in social culture.