Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.

WARNING, CONTAINS IMAGES OF FEMALE LEGS AND MIDRIFFS TOWARDS THE END.

David Hume said that, in is Essays, Moral and Political, 1742. Not the bright red warning, I mean the title of the post. It was one of several possible early instances of the phrase "Beauty is in the eye of the Beholder" that I could find - and I went with it because the tallest building in my University is named after him.

Not that I actually know who he is.

But that's not the point. The point is that seven months ago today, a friend of mine, Adrielne, posted on her blog an entry entitled "Wow, They're Hot!". It was essentially a list of twenty female the celebrities that she found most attractive (She did one for men as well). Now, I agreed that about four of them are attractive. So she challenged me to come up with a meagre  top-ten list of attractive women and I couldn't do it.

I don't know why. I looked up several names of people who I thought should be attractive, and I just didn't want to add them to my top ten. But then I had a similar discussion with my flatmate a week or two ago, and that night decided to make a list - and actually complete it. For my first friend, I decided to post a response blog entry on my own site. And this is it...

The Projection of False Identities onto Internet Friends.

Have you ever met someone online, who you've never met in real-life?

For some of you, the answer is no. But if you're the kind of person that managed to find this blog, then the chances are that you have at least one online friend. But how much do you really know them?

Talking online every day for a month can make you feel that you know them, like you know them better than anyone else possibly could. But of course, you know that they know barely anything about you. In fact at some point you've probably discussed the dangers of online friendships, how either of you could be some wierdo that we hear so much about in the media. But you know you aren't (at least, I would hope so).

A brief stint of online chat with somoene gives us a false impression, one that is very often completely different from the real-life person. I know, for example, that I am much more confident, much more talkative online than I am in real-life. I'm more risqué over email than I might be face-to-face. I'm much shyer in person than I am over IM. It stands to reason that they are different too. Perhaps not all of them. Possibly I'm the only one. But I doubt it...