Flonne Wrote:The internet as a research method only? Sure.Hi Flonne, thanks for being so open with your thoughts. I know how you feel, because I also felt the same way (oh, it sounds trite, but it's so true.).
Everything else? No, no, no. One of two things will happen to people when they excessively use the internet as a social tool. One, they will become a selfcentered, immature, sub-intelligible blob. Examples of such are people who use myspace, gaia, or /b/ frequently. After they exit this phase of their life (if they ever), they will maintain their selfcentered attitude for much of the rest of their lives, and will most likely die happy because they are ignorant of how utterly useless they were in life, and how much suffering they wrought on others in order to please themselves. The second group are the people who end up like me; manic-depressive, cynical, frozen-hearted assholes who look down on the rest of society and only see their many flaws. Every time when walking outside, it is physically painful to observe other people going about their daily lives, blissfully ignorant of what the OCD people like this go through.
Either way is NOT the correct way to mature; one leaves you as a child for most of your life, the other leaves you a husk of your former self, filled only with hate for others. Of course, these are the extremes of the spectrum, for people like me who are online every waking hour of their lives, but the fact remains that society has taken to a disturbingly downward spiral in it's social networking skills. You need only look at me to confirm that, I suppose.
I'd love to encourage you to take hope in the future though. I don't know your story of course, but I get the impression there are actually not too many people who stay that way for the rest of their lives. As we get more mature, we learn to do something about our situation and not just think "omg, I'm a crap person." I think there's often some sort of breaking point situation where we realise that we just have to grow up and try and do the hard yards. And though it might never be exactly like the development of a person who has never touched internet, that's ok. Regardless of their experiences, by and large, people learn to be at least functioning adults in the adult world.
And, for the record, not only do I doubt that there is only one way of maturing, I also think none of us will ever stop maturing - we will never be "mature." It's a continual process. No one, whether they're in your school, at university, or on this forum, is fully "mature." And I guess those of us who are less mature than others should be able to take comfort that the ones who are more mature will understand what they are going through, because they must have been through it themselves.