{"id":2591,"date":"2008-05-11T08:25:37","date_gmt":"2008-05-11T08:25:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/05\/11\/weirdness-facilitation\/"},"modified":"2008-05-11T08:25:37","modified_gmt":"2008-05-11T08:25:37","slug":"weirdness-facilitation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/05\/11\/weirdness-facilitation\/","title":{"rendered":"Weirdness Facilitation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Jacques Distler <a href=\"http:\/\/golem.ph.utexas.edu\/~distler\/blog\/archives\/001679.html\">asks the question that every blog-reader has asked at some point<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Did all of this exist <i>before<\/i> the Web? Or have people just gotten a whole lot weirder in the past 15 years?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>(I&#8217;m not even going to attempt to describe what triggered the question&#8230;)<\/p>\n<p>I tend to think that the weirdness was always there, and the Internet has just made it easier for the weird people to find each other. You can find antecedents of the social Internet in things like <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.suntimes.com\/ebert\/2008\/05\/fanzines_beget_blogs.html\">mimeographed fanzines<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/nielsenhayden.com\/makinglight\/archives\/001424.html#001424\">nineteenth-century magazine letter columns<\/a>, so I suspect that for any modern weirdness, there are probably analogous bizarrities in some pre-Internet forum or another. A bit of Googling will probably turn up some lovingly maintained page on exotic mail-order kink in 1795, or some such&#8211; whatever weird stuff went on in the past, somebody probably knows all about it, and is dying to share that knowledge with the world.<\/p>\n<p>The Internet has just enabled this stuff to get around faster. But bizarre behavior is just an emergent property of large groups of humans given the ability to communicate over long distances.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jacques Distler asks the question that every blog-reader has asked at some point: Did all of this exist before the Web? Or have people just gotten a whole lot weirder in the past 15 years? (I&#8217;m not even going to attempt to describe what triggered the question&#8230;) I tend to think that the weirdness was&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/05\/11\/weirdness-facilitation\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Weirdness Facilitation<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2591\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}