The Internet — Enabler of Guilty Pleasures

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "'Sure, the Internet has revolutionized the spread of information and all that high-minded stuff, but its combination of reach and anonymity also makes it the greatest enabler of guilty pleasures ever invented,' Jason Fry writes in the Wall Street Journal. 'Indulgence is just a click away, and nobody needs to know, except you and some server somewhere.' For example: Fry, a rock snob, has a double secret life as a pop-music fan (secret no more, of course). From the article: 'If your secret love of "Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)" has caused it to creep into your iTunes list of 25 most-played songs, a simple right-click will let you reset the play count. If you want to hear Fall Out Boy, but would rather do so in secret, you can command Last.fm to ignore that the song was played — or delete it from your charts if you forget. Viewed from the standpoint of cool logic, this behavior is at least mildly insane. But who needs things that remind us of who we really are, as opposed to how we want others to see us — or how we'd like to see ourselves?'"

Comments

Re:Welcome to the real world

[Moraelin]

I encourage you to learn more about Christians and about having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Being a Christian means accepting the fact that WITHOUT CHRIST you will go to hell no matter how you act or what you may do in this world. A Christian is supposed to accept the fact that people, by nature, are full of sin.

I know all about being a Christian. I was one, I have relatives which are, basically, fundies, I've read and memorized the bible, etc. Heck, my aunts were so big on this Christ thing, I grew up basically imaginning what I'd look like with wings. Yeah, it's sick to get a kid aged 6 to think of _death_ to that extent, but hey, that's how it works. At any rate, I'm not that much of a stranger to the Bible, you know?

A Christian is supposed to accept the fact that people, by nature, are full of sin. Once you accept Christ into your life, it means you will try everything that is possible to live without sin. If you do sin, which you will, you acknowledge that you have sinned, and pray for forgiveness.

Very true and insightful and all, but my point stands: people like to imagine themselves as having commited a lot less sins than they actually did. They'll pray for forgiveness for some, but quickly forget it, and remember the good stuff they did instead.

Or like to imagine that a lot of _their_ own sins really had an acceptable excuse, and really don't count as sins. That "thou shalt not kill" intrinsically includes "unless it's an arab or other sort of heathen." That in that context it's not just not a sin, but outright a virtue. That "thou shalt not commit adultery" really means "unless she's a willing hottie with DD cup breasts." That "love thy neighbour" really means "as long as he's your friend, but you can hate him if you think he's an asshole", and that "turn the other cheek" means "for now, until you can pay it back."

You will begin to understand. I know you said that you weren't picking on Christians

And indeed I'm not. I'm "picking" on the whole human species. Christianity may have even hammered some good ideas into some humans, but on the whole it can only do so much. Humans will be humans, in the end.

Well, not even really "picking" as such. That's how it works. There's no use either rebelling against it, or looking down at it. It's no more use than rebelling against gravity. Might as well accept it as it is, really.

This is Slashdot, so most people like to read books

Well,as I was saying, I've read the Bible already. And the Khoran, for that matter. And a bit on the history of other religions.

Those people who conveniently forgot about past sins only called themselves Christians.

True enough, I suppose, but in the end they're the majority. That's really all I was saying. That's how humans tend to work. And indeed that was really the whole point. It's not about Christians or Christianity, it's about humans. Well, most humans, anyway. Christian, Buddhists, Hindu, Muslim, whatever. The vast majority don't actually live to their ideal, but basically pad their resume for the benefit of their own conscience.

And it applies to non-religious stuff too. TFA, for example, is an example of someone who resets his own playlists and statistics so he can still think of itself as a "rock fan". So he resets the statistics of anything which isn't rock, so he doesn't have the counter-evidence right before his own eyes in the player. Go figure. But that's how humans tend to work.