This blog has pretty much nothing to do with Star Wars- it's more of an observation, really. I'm writing this by the seat of my pants, so these are just thoughts on paper with no real structure. So... "Whiners ye be warned."

...

The other day I was looking through someone's blog (forget who or when) and I noticed they had posted a link to a picture of themself. Of course, I was a little surprised to see that they did not, in fact, look like their avatar. I don't recall at this moment who or what the avatar was, but it most certainly was not an accurate representation of what said person looked like.

Now of course, this is a pretty unreasonable expectation, I know. People usually aren't going to look like Kyp Durron or Jacen Solo or a buzz-droid (generally); yet I found myself strangely startled to see how completely different people actually look from their avatars.

When you spend so much of your time reading people's writing, you begin to develop a kind of image in your mind of what you think that person looks like, based on how they talk in a blog. For most of us, this isn't some set-in-stone mental image that we call up everytime we see this person's blog, but we get a kind of...sense, I suppose, of what that person might look like.

Since our only visual clues are words on a page and wholly inaccurate avatars, this mental image is usually far, far from what the person actually looks like. I guess it's kind of the same as listening to someone on the radio all the time- after a while, you get a sort of image in your head of what that person looks like, and then one day you happen to see that person or notice a picture of them and, lo and behold, they are fatter than you thought, or shorter, or uglier, or more attractive, or older...etc. And yet we're so startled to see this, despite the fact that we know our image is, most likely, wrong.

It's amazing how the mind works- how we're able to conjure up entire images, even personalities, of people we've never met and have had very little contact with- and then, at a subconsciouss level, convice ourselves that we are in fact completely right about our assumption. This would explain why we feel startled, even a little resentful or disappoined, when we find out that we're not right, but are in fact way off the mark.

It really starts to make you wonder; often times people who are on the internet are not who they claim to be. Just look at stalkers- they generally convince their victims they are someone completely else; quite successfully. But perhaps this isn't so much due to the skill of the pretender, but more of the nature of the internet...and the mind's capability to envision that which we cannot see or know.

It makes me think...what do people think I look like, if they too are basing their opinions upon my avatar? *Glances at dianoga*



Comments if ye feel em.

JV out.