Says danah boyd:
I love the way that it mixes things up. For most users of all ages – but especially teens – the Internet today is about socializing with people you already know. But I used to love the randomness of the Internet. I can’t tell you how formative it was for me to grow up talking to all sorts of random people online. So I feel pretty depressed every time I watch people flip out about the dangers of talking to strangers. Strangers helped me become who I was. Strangers taught me about a different world than what I knew in my small town. Strangers allowed me to see from a different perspective. Strangers introduced me to academia, gender theory, Ivy League colleges, the politics of war, etc. So I hate how we vilify all strangers as inherently bad. Did I meet some sketchballs on the Internet when I was a teen? DEFINITELY. They were weird; I moved on. And it used to be a lot harder to move on when everything was attached to an email that was paid for.
This is the one thing I miss the most about the idea of Usenet (as opposed to the current reality of it, a cesspool of obsessives and spammers). Usenet’s structure was a topdown, subject based hierarchy of groups: if you hate Barney the dinosaur there was only one place to go to: alt.barney-dinosaur.die.die.die, so you were forced to mix it up with all kinds of people, some which you liked, some which you didn’t, some you hated. It didn’t matter, they were all part of the same community, something you don’t have as much with blogs, let alone Facebook and such.
It’s not entirely black and white of course: Usenet groups did often evolve into semi-closed communities which you had to adjust to to fit in and you can have inter- and intrablog dialogues on something approaching the same scale as was possible on Usenet. But it still seems to me that online socialising has become much more splintered and individualised, with online public spaces now (part-)privatised.