The
Internet is home to many different social groupings.
People with like
interests meet and discuss their
hobbies,
political views,
cultural perspectives and bodily functions in places devoted to
computers,
sexual orientations, favorite
genre of
fiction, appeal of
furry costumes,
videogames,
fundamentalist religions, adoration of a particular
television program,
devotion to the
research and
development of important new
emoticons, dislike for garden
slugs, and
many,
many other
things. I have one
roommate who discusses bootleg
MP3s, another who frequents
websites devoted to a particular sexual
fetish, and another who devours each and every
List Of Jokes Of Dubious Humor Content she can find. There are so many of these groups that people can be usefully
indexed and categorized according to the
unique cross section of the Internet
clique universe to which
he or
she belongs. Someday, I believe
Social Security numbers will be generated through numerical encoding of this
data.
What I worry about is that I do not belong to any of these cliques. Does this make me nobody?