e-sentimentality

by Bob on April 5, 2007

One wonders often about e-sentimentality: Feelings expressed between e-friends, specifically friends who have never spoken or met in person or even exchanged paper letters or have in vivo common friends. Only on-line.

It's so easily transacted and expressed seemingly without any strings of importance. And so easy to shut off, in the click of a mouse on a dialogue box. Just like a remote control clicker on a TV remote.

One also asks if one can feel anything real and permanent with e-friends as opposed to real-life friends. One has great doubts. Or if one can feel sentiments towards one's e-friends, can or will they reciprocate genuinely ? One also is in a grave dilemma.

Under the covers of immensely intense interactions, on all levels, there is a certain knowledge that it is an elevator relationship. When the floor is reached, despite all smiles, no one will contact anyone again. More importantly, one can abort an e-relationship so trivially. Especially when there is no outside way to maintain contact.

Put the case, as Dickens would have his solicitor say to Pip in Great Expectations, that if an e-friend were to fall physically ill, one would doubt that one of his e-friends would be either seriously concerned, or even if concerned seriously, he would have no way of contacting anyone to find out if the person is okay. There's the rub. There is an illusion of caring but not the follow-up to care.

No one even knows each other's real names, typically.

It would seem also that an e-person has a huge number of e-friends, which also seems to be kind of a cruel goal or achievement, to maximise the number of e-friends. Along with that it is typical for a e-person to have numerous e-conversations going on simultaneously. So we have a sad situation of short and inattentive responses and exchanges between any two. This is a huge difference in relationships from those in sincerity and reality.

There once was a goal of a paperless office. It may have somehow come to pass now with e-mail instead of paper memos. But a parallel to this is a true-sentiment-less electronic village.

All the world's a stage said Shakespeare. We see that in many places in the electronic village. Good old Will knew before his time.

It also reminds one of the shadow people in Plato's Myth of the Cave in his Republic. All shadows. No one really there perhaps.

And e-relationships go in short bursts often. Perhaps like an electronic singles bar.

So it goes. One is reluctant to give up one's heart-felt relationships in life for e-sentimentalities.

The humourous Marx brothers once very reasonably and comically paraphrased Ockham's Razor of philosophy in a very succinct fashion. If it has a beak, waddles, quacks, and has webbed feet, it is likely not an elephant dressed up like a duck; rather it is, by Ockham's Razor, simply a duck.

So one must guard carefully one's friendship and beyond that, one's love. Either that or risk an illusion and the short stick of being hurt by an illusion in a vacuum. One winds up clapping in the forest with one hand.

One does know that many scholars and academics, such as Dr. Sherry Turkle at MIT, have some brilliant writings on this topic. in either direction. But the case stands.

If one button can so trivially delete an e-friend in an instant, in a sea of other clamouring e-friends, there is a distinct disadvantage over the real thing.

Yogi Berra was quoted jointly and severally by many. He was to have said "It ain't over till it's over", and "Deja-vu all over again". We need a quaint Yogi quote for this whole e-experience. Several come to mind from our dear Yogi, who was a yogi in both senses of the word.

"You can observe a lot just by watching"

"If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else"

"You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you are going, because you might not get there".

"Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded".

The psychologist, William James, in his opus, The Varieties of Religious Experience, has a chapter on "The Reality of the Unseen" and it is a robust intellectual meandering. Therein is contained an interestingly enlightening statement about the ancient Greek gods: "It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we might call 'something there,' more deep and more general by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed."

Fritz Lang's brilliant 1927 film "Metropolis" comes to mind in this context. Lang knew.

As did Mary Shelley in her classic Frankenstein, whose title in full she made wisely "Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus". And Prometheus in Greek legend was a real trickster. Amongst his deeds, he stole fire from the gods and gave it to man, whereas the gods had provided divine fire to man before that. One wonders about that power which he gave mere mortals. It was written by some scholars that what Prometeus stole was in the end an inferior fire, a purely mechanical fire, as opposed to the immensely powerful fire of the gods. It is kind of funny and odd to visit Rockefeller Center in New York City and see a gold sculpture of Prometheus carrying fire in his hand over and above an ice skating rink. Perhaps not odd in other senses.

Then one also remembers the brilliant poem of T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". Do I dare ? Do I dare disturb the universe ?

* * *

Do I dare

Disturb the universe ?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

* * *

Make that minute a millisecond on the internet.

And in Prufrock again Eliot writes:

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

Caveat Emptor. Cave canem. Beware of your feelings and hopes in any e-situation. One is told by wiser ones to be forewarned. Like Fritz Lang.