Sunday, January 18, 2009

In the Future, Everyone Will Be "The Man" For Fifteen Seconds

One of the odd things about the internet is meeting famous, or semi-famous people and interacting with them in a kind of community, and having to reconcile this experience with the experience of being a fan.

This is most pronounced, for me, on forums. More than once I have discovered that a person I like very much as a writer is not a person I can get along with on a message board. Of course, there's no reason to expect otherwise. You have to remind yourself that the writer of your favorite novel is not your friend, no matter how much time you feel you've spent with him, or how close you may feel to his characters.

And the strangeness of this dichotomy reaches its peak when the object of fandom has moderator power over the board. I have a small problem with authority - not in a spiteful troublemaker kind of way, more in a naive anarchist kind of way - so it's particularly uncomfortable when someone I admire becomes The Man. I have to resist an urge to take the side of a banned poster, even if they deserved it, and I have to temper my knee-jerk emotional response, which is resentment and paranoia.

I can see in myself the same emotional reaction that causes netizens worldwide to cry "The mods are nazis!" Such reactions are (mostly) unwarranted, but the net is so much like an anarchist utopia that the occasional imposition of authority stands out like black on white. It's impossible not to feel threatened. On occasion I have felt deeply disturbed by events like this, but I get over it within a couple days. I guess the lesson is "sleep on it."

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