A funny thing happened on the way to the internet...,

There are very few approved routines available to stand-up comedians. They are:

• Men and women are different.
• Airline food is shit.
• Kids these days.
• Black people are different from white people (There are two pre-requisites for this routine; the performer must be black, and all differences tend to favour black people.)
• Your customs in this foreign country are quaint.
• Everybody who goes to prison will acquire a 3oolb girlfriend called Bubba.
• Every blue eyed blonde teenage girl in a chatroom is in fact a 300lb ex-girlfriend called Bubba.

Actually it's just the last one that I want to talk about. I have only ever been in a chatroom once and I was pretending to be a teenaged girl. Let me explain. Way back in the dim dark past, before I ever bought myself a computer I was visiting with some friends who had a teenaged daughter, D. D was in a chatroom talking to some alleged teenaged boy from Tuscon. As I am by nature a curious soul, who likes nothing more than learning - and I'm a bit of a stickybeak, I was watching this take place. D would explain what she was doing and what the exotic abbreviations meant and all was well with the world. D's mother nagged her into performing some menial task which was going to take about twenty minutes, so D talked me into continuing chatting with the alleged denizen of Tuscon.
All went well for a couple of minutes talking about music (D had a folder of CDs that I used as crib notes), then it all went pear-shaped. Tuscon boy wanted to know what sort of clothes D wore. I heard a ping on my radar, but I just typed in a list of clothing items. One of the items was 'skirts'. Tuscon boy asked 'How short are the skirts?'
Before I could think of a reply he added 'Short enough to see your cunt?' I panicked and ran for (D's) Mum. She panicked, too. D turned up, read what was on the screen, laughed and did the chatroom equivalent of calling for a bouncer in a nightclub. Dunno how that worked. Dunno what happened to Tuscon boy, either.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that I have been thinking about internet personas lately. What they are, who adopts them, how they create their particular persona and why. Apart from the name, I don't have one. When I first bought my computer and beat Telstra into submission so that I could get on the net, just about the first thing that I did was get onto Google, type in 'blogs' and see what turned up. The very first blog I ever looked at was After Grog Blog. I still read it. In fact there are three other blogs I looked at that day that I still read, A Yobbo's View, Man of Lettuce and The Spin Starts Here. Anyway, I was looking at these blogs, thinking to myself "This looks alright, I might leave a comment here."
From memory it was on TSSH to tell Caz that I would marry her if I was allowed to wear..., something. Can't remember. I looked at all the other comments and they all had pseudonyms on them. At least I assumed that they were pseudonyms. You don't see many people walking around with names like Wobblebottom Jizzbomb. I assumed that it was customary to use a pseudonym so I chose Dirk Thruster, which is the name of a character I played in a movie made about twenty years ago by a hornbag Arts student whom I was trying (and failing) to bone. The name is as far as the character development went. I lack the imagination to create another personality and I'm too lazy to stay in character for any length of time, anyway. Every opinion that I have ever stated is Dirk's; which is to say mine. The language used to express those opinions is pretty much the same as I use in conversation, with most examples of the words 'fuck' and 'cunt' excised from it. I swear a lot.
Probably the major difference between the way that I behave on the net and the way that I behave everywhere else is that I am more argumentative face to face. When I first started net surfing I would stick my oar in wherever I could find a gap. I soon realised a few things, though; there are a lot more well-informed people on the net that there are in pubs, so I would get shot down in flames quite frequently - which taught me the benefits of research; a lot of otherwise rational people lost their sense of reason in debates, particularly when those debates involve politics or religion; a lot of people (this is related to, but not synonymous with the previous point.) cannot conceive of the idea that another person may arrive at a different conclusion than themselves when presented with the same evidence; almost every person involved in arguing on the net has a position from which they will not budge, so any attempt to do so is not only futile, but leads to animosity from the other person involved; everybody on the net is a tough guy (Except the girls, they're all hard bitches).
So these days I am a bit more careful about raising my voice and only do so when I am confident of my ground. If a person with whom I am having a debate refuses to acknowledge my line of reasoning or becomes abusive, then I just stop. How tough do you have to be to call somebody names from thousands of kilometres away? Somebody whom you have never met?
There are people around for whom violent abuse hurled at random strangers appears to be their only outlet. I feel sorry for these people. I often wonder what is so wrong with their lives that the only way that they can feel 'empowered' or whatever the buzzword du jour is, is to send insults to somebody over a - real in some instances, but usually just perceived - slight on the recipient's part.
Sometimes I think that it is for these people that the internet was, in fact, created. How many of them would be littering the shoreline at The Gap or giving train drivers the shits as they went under the front if it wasn't for the outlet provided to these inadequately equipped individuals?
Of course, there is a very strong argument in favour of removing these people from the gene pool. The trouble with that theory is deciding when to stop. Let 'em breed, I say. They'll die out eventually anyway and in the meantime they are at least diverting. A very small minority of them are even amusing.