Breaking news: Homos love the internet—this from a recent Harris Interactive poll. I'm not sure if this is good news—you know, the old optimism about using the internet as a tool to create communities (and more readers!)—or bad. Let's just say I felt a little queasy when I read that "Excluding email, nearly twice as many gays and lesbians (32%) say they are online between 24 and 168 hours per week, compared to 18 percent of heterosexuals." On the one hand, that number could simply indicate that queers are more web-savvy (a fifth of us use Craigslist, compared to a seventh of hets), especially if it includes workday hours. On the other, it could suggest that many of us are terrified to leave the house or can't find dates in the real world. Or even worse: We're lazy slobs.
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Or better, to provide an optimistic view: We queers appreciate the potential of online communication a bit more than our straight couterparts do. Much of the necessary weeding-out process is taken care of upfront; it's simple to divine whether a website, forum, blog, etc. is queer-friendly or not, thus we don't waste time barking up a wrong tree. I also think that epithets and invective are much more easily shrugged off online -- it's easy to delete and/or block hateful sentiments, whereas "real world" interaction carries much more of a threat of harm, physically and emotionally.
That said, I am curious to learn of others' experiences with "online addiction", primarily because I had a very meaningful personal relationship with someone who retreated into online relationships at the cost of our own. Essentially, he grew to love his LiveJournal "community" more than he did me.
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