It's the beauty of the Web. You can pretend to be anything you want. But people figure out pretty quick if you don't live up to it.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
If you're gonna pretend to be something, then you have to at least live up to what it is.
Sometimes, the Internet can feel like a middle-school playground populated by brats in ski masks who name-call and taunt with the fake bravery of the anonymous. But sometimes - thank goodness - it's nicer than real life.
Wandering around the web is like living in a world in which every doorway is actually one of those science fiction devices which deposit you in a completely different part of the world when you walk through them. In fact, it isn't like it, it is it.
Have you heard of this new thing called the internet? It's giving people new expectations. It's allowing them to become their own expert. Knowledge lies anxious at their fingertips. Gloss over the truth in your advertising and you'll quickly be dismissed as a poser.
The Web forces me to be disciplined and not to waste time - but before the Web was invented, there were plenty of opportunities to do that anyway.
There's this large trend - I think the next trend in the Web, sort of Web 2.0 - which is to have users really express, offer, and market their own content, their own persona, their identity.
Web users ultimately want to get at data quickly and easily. They don't care as much about attractive sites and pretty design.
It's insane that people have these Internet identities. It has very little to do with who we really are. As a writer, who I'm friends with, how I spend my time, what I look like, what I wear, what I eat, what kind of music I like - it's totally not important to the work.
Like the Earth, the Web is a less appealing place than it used to be. If I want attitude and arguing and meanness and profanity and wrong information screamed at me as gospel, I'll get in a time machine and spend Christmas with my family in 1977.
I have not looked at any of the 'Pretender' Web sites. I'm scared of the Internet.