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[lallara zhuul]

Few things.

I don't believe that Internets can ever give you fulfilling social interaction.

It can give you something that make you feel like you can fill your social needs through it.

But it will never compare to the real deal.

I think that you need to be face to face with a person in a real life situation to actually be able to communicate.

Because language in itself is a very faulty way of communicating things.

It is the only one that we have at the moment, so to minimize misunderstandings a real social interaction is the only one I really trust these days.

Then the consumer thing...

I don't believe that we have evolved into consumers, it is something that has been indoctrinated to us through the media and culture. It is reinforced by psychological mechanisms that are constantly being used by the media to manipulate people into defining themselves by what they consume.

My parents are from a previous generation than I am, if they buy something they want something that lasts and which is permanent. They invest with their purchases for the future, they have stuff that are generations old that is still in use. They are not consumers in the sense that the current generation is.

I believe that the current generation that has been raised with computers and the internet in their lives have been indoctrinated to such an extent that is of a completely different scale than the previous generations.

Mainly because the tools of the indoctrination really were not there to do this to the previous generations.

Their brains weren't altered by constant barrage of stress inducing programming since childhood to be bored if something in their surrounding does not change every 10 seconds.
The standards of living were not high enough to have a screen of some kind in every room of the house.
They we're not constantly at the beck and call of their social circles.

Which is the situation that we are dealing at the moment.

The mechanics are not something that is new, they are something that charlatans have been using for ages.

There is plenty of psychologists that have discovered plenty of things about the way that human mind works by examining the mechanics of why people perceive things that are not there, mostly of supernatural variety, ghosts, prophecy, mediums and whatnot.

It's a good read. It has stories and statistics and all that.

But the mechanics in us are sound, for example.

If I would say that all the people in these forums are more creative than the norm, they have better sense of humor than the average person, they are better drivers than the average person and are more trustworthy than the average person in EVE. I could add on adjectives like more literate than the average forum user in the EVE forums, more capable of seeing the other side of the discussion etc.

Most people would actually identify with these things even though I have not met any one of them.

A statistical funny fact:
80% of people believe that they are better than the average drivers.
75% of people that have been asked the same question while they are in the hospital after a car crash believe that.

Most of the study to these mechanics has been done after the sixties, since psychology has not really been a science (still not is, some people think that Freud is the bees knees still) for not that long.
Which means that these mechanics were not consciously used to manipulate the masses for that long.
It has probably taken until the nineties until they could be fully utilized.

Which would conveniently explain why the religion has failed to such extent, compared to the media forces that are currently in use.

Religion has not had the capability to manipulate people 24/7 unlike the television, only way they could have done it is by feeding your ego stuff that would make it criticize you 24/7 but that does not work all the time. Especially since the indoctrinators would not believe what they we're preaching and pretty much everyone can see if someone is lying to them (even if its just an uneasy feeling in the background).

Meh, its all a bit hodgepodge but it makes sense to me now.
I better catch some Z's

[Graanvlokkie]

... A statistical funny fact:

80% of people believe that they are better than the average drivers.
75% of people that have been asked the same question while they are in the hospital after a car crash believe that ...

And 75% of all statistics are made up on the spot!
Source: http://www.bomus.org/index.php

[Wanoah]

Just as an aside on the social networking angle. I recently stepped a bit out of my gaming comfort zone to play Don't Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain't Your Story. I was a bit put off by the manga art style initially, but if you look beyond that (or like that style in any case) you get a surprisingly well-written story with some good insights into the changing ideas of privacy in the modern world. Also, it's free. I enjoyed it enough to go ahead and buy one of Christine Love's other games on Steam.

[Makkal]

Whenever I join a new forum community, I find threads full of long time members getting all nostalgic about better times. I call it late-comer syndrome. 

Well, in general, people like to communicate themselves to others, and to hear others communicate. It makes more sense if you realize that the act of communication is often an end in itself, not simply a means.

Very true.

And there's also the fact that - despite the occasional act of bullying or violence - most humans are fairly decent and will happily accept you into their "tribe" if you can relate to their own inner thoughts and desires.

Yes, humans are nice to people who think like they do, we're still learning to deal with the billions of people who don't think like we do.