The Internet has changed and impacted many things but I think the single most important thing it has done is provide a means to simultaneously diminish loneliness and expand a sense of isolation.
On the one hand, the Internet has provided the means for a guy who gets the warm fuzzies contemplating tickling a woman in stocks on the bottoms of her nylon clad feet to realize he is not alone in his desires - that there are in fact others who share his fantasies. And you can fill in the blanks on a fantasy with any combination - guy loves being tickled on his naval by a girl in silk gloves; suspended from the rafters and rib tickled without mercy; etcetera; etcetera; etcetera.
We are not alone. And you can replace tickling with an infinite variety of fetishes and kinky behavior, or, for that matter, all variety of interests both mundane and exotic and through the Internet discover you are not alone in your passion.
We are not alone. We are community. The sense of community, of sharing was ever so much harder pre-Internet.
On the other hand, it can be easy to lose perspective if you let your reality become to focused only on what you find through the Internet. You raise your head up from the computer screen and the "real world" neither seems to care nor notice that you have a special fondness for tickling and being tickled. This has two outcomes.
One, even with this wonderful online community., you feel more isolated in your real daily life because none in that realm seem to share or understand your tickle preferences. And that can grow into fear, sometimes supported by actual experiences that your love of tickling marks you as weird or strange or "sick."
Secondly, you can begin to feel an oppressed minority living in the midst of all these bland vanilla people. Evidence of these comes from the abundance of posts in the forum about "coming out" and concern over the reactions of others to tickling in general and the poster's tickling jones in particular.
And so in the midst of finding fellow travelers on the road to tickleland and a sense of community built online, in non-online life the sense of isolation can become acute.
I think a dose of common sense is needed to keep some balance in our lives. Tickling, and the broad spectrum of activity it encompasses, is simply a preference, a choice, a need, a desire some of us have for our interactions with others. Just as the guys who love breast or the people who love spanking or caning or - fill in your fetish - have a need in their lives they wish to fulfill. But we are not an oppressed class of humans the way, say, homosexuals have been. Or the way the disabled have been. There are not about to be Tickle Pride parades.
We may share a kinship with the much larger group of people who have some fetish or other and join the movement for tolerance in human sexual behavior. The membership on TMF is dwarfed by the membership on a site like Fetlife that encompasses all variety of fetish and kink.
The real distress and anguish expressed in posts about telling friends and others or having them find out about one's tickle preferences are genuine but oft times get blown way out proportion. It is nowhere near the same as coming out of the closet about gender preference. In fact, most people could care less about how much it excites you to tickle or be tickled with the exception of a significant other with whom you'd like to engage in some tickle play. The Internet can magnify these concerns into monstrous obstacles to happiness.
There are some sex positions I prefer over others and other preferences I have in my intimate encounters but have no need to go announcing those to people and make it some momentous coming out. Tickling should be in the same category. Share with those who need to know and quit making it out to be akin to revealing the secret to life.
Our Internet world has a way of skewing our perspective and making things that are very small seem very large indeed.
Tickle life before the Internet was both worse and better. You felt more alone but you didn't make such a big deal about it.