Statistician
Oct. 12th, 2003 01:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thessalian
You are Form 0, Phoenix: The Eternal.
"And The Phoenix's cycle had reached
zenith, so he consumed himself in fire. He
emerged from his own ashes, to be forever
immortal."
Some examples of the Phoenix Form are Quetzalcoatl
(Aztec), Shiva (Indian), and Ra-Atum
(Egyptian).
The Phoenix is associated with the concept of life,
the number 0, and the element of fire.
His sign is the eclipsed sun.
As a member of Form 0, you are a determined
individual. You tend to keep your sense of
optomism, even through tough times and have a
positive outlook on most situations. You have
a way of looking at going through life as a
journey that you can constantly learn from.
Phoenixes are the best friends to have because
they cheer people up easily.
Which Mythological Form Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla
Haven't been up to much today, but I guess I got to thinking about the friends I have made/kept online. And for some reason (maybe because I'm fuck-warped), I got to thinking about statistics. Trying to find someone you can truly get along with becomes one big warped exercise in statistics.
Take six billion people -- the approximate population of the planet. Take away all the ones who are much older than me and much younger than me (factoring in a, say, ten-year buffer around my age either way). Then take away all the ones who can't speak English. That doesn't leave as many people as you think, and all those criteria are baseline.
Then you look at lifestyle. There might be a very nice person who meets baseline criteria, but they may well be a homeless crack addict, which kind of makes it hard to hold a deep conversation. I'm not necessarily saying that anyone I befriend has to be straight-arrow or in my ... erm ... class (though we supposedly live in a classless society, these things exist), I'm not likely to ever meet anyone above upper middle class, and they'd probably snub me for my clothes if I did. And as for the homeless crack addict in the above example ... well, I'd probably fear them and they might try to mug me, and that really puts the kibosh on a friendship.
After you eliminate all the people I'm not likely to encounter in day-to-day life and have no chance of speaking to on a social level, you have to take intellectual factors into account. Not just, "Sorry; you make my brain hurt 'cos your dumb as a brick", but huge conflicts in personal belief systems. I could not marry a redneck, for example; I'd think he was a brainless, gun-toting Neanderthal and he'd think I was some bleeding heart liberal who needed a few beatings to 'straighten me out' so I would realise my place was in the kitchen. Um. Sorry. No.
Then, hobbies and interests. Now, the friends I do have hold a wide range of interests, and some of them escape me entirely, but there has to be some common ground. And I'm not likely to get chatty and matey with some girl who believes, for example, that literature begins with V.C. Andrews and ends with Marian Keyes, or a guy whose musical knowledge extends only as far as 50 Cent. There are a lot of people out there who pigeonhole themselves, and that sort of person doesn't appeal to me any more than I'd appeal to them. So that's removing a fair chunk of the remaining 'friendship hits' right there.
Getting to the point here, folks. If I had to factor in geography -- for example, people living or at least working in Central London -- that would pretty much put the kibosh on it. Too few matches anyway, and the size of even London would make the few people that are out there too hard to find. It's not as if we're tagged like beasts in the wild. Well, not for social purposes. Not unless we're complete poseurs who insist on dressing for our sub-genre.
Which brings us to the Internet. The part about hobbies and interests comes out immediately -- weblog communities, chatrooms, message boards are all geared for a hobby or interest, and other shared interests come out in conversation. Age is no longer so much of a factor, nor is class, race or even gender. (Of course, you have to beware of perverts, but that's another matter.) Intellect comes out in how one 'sounds'. In short, you can tell right away where all the factors mesh. And you're not limited by geography. Still by language, but not by geography. You can have friends, even if you never see them, anywhere in the world, and have a great conversation via e-mail about, say, the relative merits of each track on Offspring's "Americana" album or an AIM chat that bounces from what has been retrieved from the human colon to Lovecraft to the relative merits of Dickens over Bronte.
To sum up -- some people say that those who conduct their friendships almost exclusively over the Internet have no life. I'd be more inclined to believe that if all of them were incapable of socialising with real life people. Most of the people I know would much prefer to, if only they could find someone in their area that they could have a meaningful conversation with. I mean a meaningful conversation, not just what tripe was on TV last night. But they can't, so they have those conversations with the people they know online instead. Basically, I think it's healthy. It reminds people who make up those skewed bits of the social line graph that they're not as alone as they feel themselves to be.
Wow. That was a bit sounding-off, wasn't it? I think I'll stop lest I sound too far up my own arse. Just thinkin' me thinks.
Thess
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Date: 2003-10-12 07:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-12 08:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-12 08:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-13 01:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-13 03:27 am (UTC)Although as it happens, I find myself in the same situation.
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Date: 2003-10-13 03:35 am (UTC):o)
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Date: 2003-10-12 02:29 pm (UTC):-)