2004-10-14»
knowing you're in a bubble»The important thing about being in a self-contained bubble (or circle jerk) of people who are otherwise unrepresentative of the world of the whole, is knowing that you're in a bubble, and trying to find out the approximate shape of that bubble. Everybody is in a bubble of some sort, and I often think the ones who are the most sneering about other people's parochialism demonstrate the most ignorance, by assuming they speak for everyone.
And I think I speak for everyone when I say that.
What prompted this was a look through some of my old notes on things to blog. They're so old as to be mostly incomprehensible, but the ones that do still ring true look to have some permanent worth to them. One of them was my first note about this:
JWZ has pretty much ascertained that almost everybody can now cope with HTML mail. I always use HTML mail as my own personal reminder of how small a bubble I live within. Almost every mail I get that I read is text-only. HTML mail for me is a freakish exception. That's the exact opposite of the majority experience. Mail for all intents and purposes these days is HTML.
I worry a little that my Bayesian spam filters are slowly coming to the conclusion that I must never ever be allowed to see HTML mail - even if it's from my sister and the message is "Would you like some of this 80 million pounds I just won in the Lottery?". Actually, that does sounds like spam. Bad example.)
Note that this has nothing to do with whether mail should be in HTML. If you think it shouldn't, you're probably part of my bubble, which is large -- certainly so large that I can't see its end horizon, although I know that it's not very large compared to the rest of the online world, and tiny and irrelevant compared to the global population.