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amayos -> Publically Outed (2/2/2007 8:02:58 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: elcorazonsuhogar
I would like to pose a situation that occurred to a friend of mine this past week and ask for responses on how you would have handled it.
You have a profile and a picture on this site. You are out shopping in a city mall [...] and approached in a store by man who asks if you have the screen name such and such. You have used this name for many years in all manner of places on the net. You acknowledge yes. He immediately says he is such and such from Bondage and asks if you are still with the same Master. I am curious how you would have reacted and what advice you would give this "man" should he read this thread?
Generally, I don't mind people recognizing me in public, so long as they are polite about it. I apply the same rules to the internet that I would to a great ballroom dance or similarly extravagant social gathering; would I think it strange if any one of those hundreds of people in attendance that eve, with whom I had no personal relations or intimate knowledge of prior to or after the occasion, recognized me openly in public? Certainly not, so long as they were polite about it.
The internet, in the capacity it is used here and on so many other networks, is a social instrument. It is essentially a much larger ball room—with many masked dancers, granted—but a gathering place all the same. What you reveal here is up to your discretion, just as it would be in physical audience with any number of cloaked strangers gathered under a unified interest. Reveal what you like to reveal, and guard what information you must, but I feel we should keep in mind that as abstract and sinister as the internet may seem, it's nothing more than a meeting place without walls, carrying with it all the same potential threats and veiled predators we casually reveal our faces to and brush shoulders with in the streets on a daily basis.
As for advice to the man in question, I would suggest he deeply considers decorum and empathy in these matters; the mere fact alone that you may recognize someone from a certain place or event does not give you license to commit gross trespasses of social etiquette or common courtesy against them.
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