It’s fun to be anonymous: You can say and do whatever you like without fear of consequence. Such is the appeal of any form of communication outside of a face-to-face interaction.

Take comments on a blog:The blogging world is a strange place sometimes. Just like many aspects of technology, blogging (the Internet in general) affords folks a sort of cloaking device. With this invisibility mechanism in place, folks often say and do whatever they feel like doing. Anyone who has bothered to read the comments posted beneath a politically-charged online article can see the vitriol that often accompanies said postings.

I was updating some posts and checking comments today, and a comment struck me as a little odd. In the comments section of my first post on the blog, you will see \’)/* ekibastos. Yes, strange, to say the least. With great curiosity and expectation, I googled this (seemingly) gibberish, to find that if you maintain a blog, this \’)/* ekibastos person has hit a lot of blogs and message boards online for a while now, but always with the \’)/* ekibastos post, and nothing more. I seem to be in a large contingency of folks who post articles online that have been visited by this entity/person/mystery organism. Strangely, I don’t feel special as a result…

Andy Warhol talked about 15 minutes of fame. Assuming ekibastos is in fact a person, I wonder - because there is always a trail of binary code out there in cyberspace from all of our respective Internet pithering - if this is ekibastos’ attempt at immortality? Is this the modern equivalent of the carved bust, or a Great Pyramid?

Anyone?

Ekibastos?

Bueller??

This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008 at 2:38 pm and is filed under Insanity, Other stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.