Interesting angle for DUers. Snowden, a story about a child of the internet coming of age.
When a new and unfamiliar figure lunges into the spotlight, our first impulse is to find an online trail. This is usually a search for the incidental: a recent, tragically ironic post from a victim; Facebook updates that may have foretold a heroic or terrible act. The hope is to catch a reflected glimpse of the real person — to recover and interpret the online debris that virtually everyone now leaves behind.
Edward Snowden, as far as we know, has not left this kind of trail. If he ever maintained a Facebook or Twitter account it hasn’t been found. Instead, he left something much more interesting and deliberate. He left, in nearly 800 forum posts, not a reflection of himself but a very real part of it.
snip
Snowden’s forum persona is instantly recognizable to anyone who spent time in a major forum in the early to mid-2000s. He’s a bit of a know-it-all, a bit of a troll, opinionated about both subjects he knows well and ones he doesn’t. He unsubtly references his sex life, his security clearance, and his mysterious work. He was not shy about giving advice, which is probably the defining trait of the forum power user, all the while relating to other members as an enthusiast: of fitness, of self-improvement, and mostly of gaming. (Though he appears to have been honest throughout his posts, those interactions are the most sincere.)
This is objectively unusual, as is Snowden. But it’s not weird: Forums served people with niche interests and sensibilities that weren’t as well-served anywhere else. Forums allowed people, as Reddit and some social media outlets do now, to invert the common internet experience: Snowden, who complained to other forum members about his strange and lonely hours, spoke often with other forum members about meeting up. It seems as though he never did, but that was fine. Meetups are fleeting and supplementary, not the other way around. The forum was home base.
snip
But he took with him the set of values he either learned or became comfortable expressing online: a keen interest in rights and speech, particularly where they concern the internet and privacy, suspicion of government and authority, a belief in both free markets and free-flowing information, and a set of cultural and aesthetic values that both set him apart from the mainstream and endear him to his people — the internet people
http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/he-came-from-the-internet
= new reply since forum marked as read
