A Question Of Character

You can run but you cannot hide..

The internet and real life are two different worlds, whilst these worlds now collide and overlap in many a way that they previously stood apart there still remains differences between the two.

In real life a greater sense of accountability and responsibility for ones actions can lead to often a greater requirement for those who would otherwise prefer to run and hide to actually deal with situations rather than choosing the path of avoidance.

Care of the Internet and social networking / instant messaging one is able to choose to just 'block' those they wish not to deal with and thus can choose the path of avoidance. As a result of this the Internet serves as an interesting medium for revealing the true character of an individual.

Whilst peoples on-line persona can conflict and be at odds with their 'real life' persona this does not alter the fact that both these personas are the creation of one and the same person. As such this means it can be a great revelation into the psychology and mindset of a person when it comes to how they act on-line as to their true nature. This has never been more relevant than now where privacy issues have highlighted that a person’s actions, their words and the thoughts they share on-line can be documented / recorded for time-lengths yet unknown and where a person’s words alone can be sufficient for them to land up in a court or jail.

Despite the fact these two worlds are now closer than ever before this has not prevented people from still demonstrating the kind of behaviour on-line that would be less likely to be accepted within a real life situation. So when an individual selects to just 'block' another over a single discussion or single action it does leave one to question why.

If there has been a succession of circumstances where the issue after numerous attempts still has shown no sign of change then it could be considered understandable to potentially take such measures. This though is in itself an important distinction as it demonstrates a level of maturity from the individual in question as they have made an attempt to find a resolution or to settle the matter rather than choose the easy way out, avoiding the situation and just blocking the person in question.

This action can also occur when someone is presented with an idea that conflicts with their own beliefs or ideologies and that they had found the whole idea so confronting that their only retort was to take an action that could be considered as little more than an emotional response by blocking that user, an action that bears great parallels with that of censorship itself and a certain sign of being closed minded.

Obviously this point does not relate to strangers though who are just out to spam users or the likes as such users are considered little different to receiving junk mail and they neither are engaging the user in discussion and are often little more than some automated script that does not care too much for what its' results are.