Friday, April 11, 2008

We Hardly Knew Ye (pfblogs.org)

This post is not about "personal finance"—so skip it if you like. "Meeting" people on the other ends of computer screens has always struck me as a little bid odd and a little bit fascinating. I remember first experiencing it maybe 20 years ago. There was not much of a Web at the time, and there were certainly no blogs. Your computer interface was more or less a flashing cursor at the end of a line of text, essentially a DOS or UNIX style prompt (for those of you who have any clue what those are). It was more a novelty, and not that many people were really doing it or doing it regularly. And if you were wondering, no, there weren't any photos or avatars popping up next to someone's message. Now it's all pretty common. Lots of people would probably tell you they have numerous interactions with clients or other business contacts strictly through e-mail—nothing in person and maybe not much by phone either. Online dating has practically fallen into the mainstream. (For all I know, it already has, and I'm years out of date.) And people regularly share intimate details of their personal lives (or ...