Primary Process Online in the Age of the Internet

When I joined the age of online communication some years ago, one of the first things that I noted was a rather relaxed superego. Online the rules of capitalization, salutation, spelling, and grammar in general are often ignored or applied sporadically. It was a culture shock to be written to without any formal address or even a name at the end of the document. Seldom did I find my high school teachers’ rule that an author should never use the first person singular in writing other than an autobiography. (In itself this does not bother me since I always personalize my own writing and encourage our authors to do the same.) In many parts of the Net, e-mailers wrote only from their gut emotion rather than from their considered reason. The variety of e-mail signatures, some held by the same person, reflected an ability to reinvent oneself with an ease not found offline.