Contextual Personality Disorder

Greetings fellow classmates and wanderers of the web! As a quick intro, I'm posting some ruminations I had a few months back on my other journal space. While I'll generally be posting thoughts on school-related topics (I'm a Masters MIS student at UCF), I'll occasionally venture into other areas. I look forward to your comments.

Contextual Personality Disorder

I'm suddenly feeling intrigued at the multitude of personality faces so many of us seem to carry. Places such as these online as anonymous as we choose, we define ourselves in ways that fit better, being chosen, than what we were born into. We're not locked into the realities of family, job, expectations here and so can be what we want, who we want, envisioned and projected Matrix-like as our ideal selves.

This flourishing is due as much to the possibilities afforded us by an alternate world that exists in what most call the internet. This is a space that runs, web-like, with no real center, organic in its ability to heal broken routes, sending speed-of-light traffic down alternate pathways faster than any human can innately fathom. This network has grown to the point where it reaches into almost every household and makes available worlds real and imaginary to the most secluded and cut-off individuals. For those of us who were born on the cusp of this age and remember schools that weren't connected to computers or the internet in any visible way, do we have trouble understanding the gestalten knowledge of those who grew into the technology from infancy? Will we always be a little clumsier, a little slower in picking up the intricacies? Yes, unless we chase down the knowledge and pull it into our own cognitive framework, and maybe even then.

I once heard that you can measure the stress level of a society by the smallest unit of time that it measures. I wonder, then, in this microsecond economy of activity, what that means for our collective peace of mind? What rules will need changing in the future? What shifts in paradigms will we have to absorb or refute, and most likely refute to our own disadvantage?

Then there's the social aspect that I see evident when walking through a college campus now vs. even only 5 years ago. Two out of three are on their cell phones, connected remotely and continually to someone somewhere else, and utterly refusing to even notice the people passing 2 feet away. We're connected to the other side of the world, and our housemates and neighbors are strangers.

I honestly don't know if this is saddening, or heartening.