I admit up front that this is nothing more than a ramble; a rumination; a disjointed collection of thoughts and observations that began as a joke between my daughter and myself. As an active participant in an online community where I've interacted with somewhere in the range of 40,000 people, I've often noted that an incredible range of personality shines through their written words; so much so that I could often quickly identify regular members who reappeared under new identities. I had attributed these telltale characteristics of cyberspace personality to individual writing style, tone, page lay-out, even idosyncracies of punctuation but I'm wondering... curious... if perhaps this phenomenom of individual presence could be due to something more. As I understand it, somewhere in the realms of hippy-dippyness, somewhere between the worlds of science, medicine, and spirituality, there is a steadfast belief that the human body is surrounded by an energy field; an aura which can be "felt" or "perceived" by gifted individuals. I even recall some long ago television program which purported to have pictures of this energy field, shown as various strands of color radiating outwards from the body. Whether or not this is actually true, I don't know. I've certainly never seen auras around bodies, nor have I ever stumbled across a plethora of evidence which would lead me to believe that such things are an irrefutable fact of science. Still, my daughter and I joke. Like so many other families, we have only one computer between us. We've grown accustomed to the fact that often the system won't work for either of us if one of us has been on for several hours; we have to shut the system down and begin fresh. "It's our energy fields, Mom," she teases,"They're not calibrated." I have no thesis to offer here. I have only a question that might be better suited to a science-fiction plot. But what IF such energy fields were real and further, that this marriage of energy created between human and machine was what created the distinct online persona? Could this be part of the larger process which explains why Doug5972 had such a warm feel to him while Frank_in_Idaho created a feeling of wary apprehension? This probably isn't a question that can be answered, but it makes for some mighty interesting pondering.
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