Murphy, Poster

Poster starts the section on "The Postmodern Subject" with the statement: "The information superhighway and virtual reality are communications media that enrich existing forms of consumer culture" (Poster 539). The word enrich jumped off the page to me immediately, and I automatically associated it with a positive connotation. When we "enrich" our lives we are making them better, getting one step closer to happiness, and in my mind putting the pieces of our lives together. But later in his essay, Poster goes on to quote Rheingold, "...are relationships and commitments as we know them even possible in a place where identities are fluid? We reduce and encode our identities as words on a screen, decode and unpack the identities of others" (Rheingold 1993, 61). Once again, I started inserting my personal opinion and experiences (a little tmesis happening during this assignment) and I came to the conclusion that this impersonal, "virtual" communication via the internet is negative. Poster brings up great ideas about how when bloggers write on the web and tell strangers their stories without predetermined visual judgments, a new confidence is gained, and conversations take place that before may not have. The key work Poster includes is "inhibition". There is no such thing as inhibition while using the internet, there is no reason for it.
I may have mentioned before that I wish I was alive in the seventies and eightes when communication was more limited and in my mind, more simple. Cell phones, e-mail, texts, and the internet are all available and encouraged. To me, when you run into someone you talk, you decide to hang out, you make a time and location, and you talk again when you see them. People turn "virtual reality" into their own reality and things that might have been hard to say while looking a person in the eye, come right out with the web acting as a buffer. I haven't had a facebook in months, and the reason for this is I felt like I was spying on other people. There were people I had never said two words to in person, but I could tell you who their friends were, where they went for spring break, and what their favorite t.v. show was. To me that becomes a voyeuristic obsession that our modern society is experiencing. What happened to meeting someone, not their web page?
I think Poster would agree with me when I say that the internet and on a larger scale the information superhighway define us and our reality, not the other way around. With everyday that passes we become more advanced and discover more and more, which to me is taking us farther from what I think is a healthy reality with healthy relationships and TRUE identities.