Friends, pseudo-friends, and virtual friends
by Bob on March 15, 2007
We have strangers we don't know at all although we have seen them or passed them by. We also have acquaintances and friends who we know a bit better and, in real life, in person.
The latest phenomenon which is a by-product of our rapidly emerging technological and seeming post-industrial society is that of virtual friends, and as a result pseudo-friends, all met online but never in person, or able to be vouched for by a person we know in the flesh.
Instant messaging, friends online services, email, blogs, and the like are the technologies that drive this mini-revolution.
So someone "meets" someone else online, and not in person. Who either person really is is debatable and arguable as a general principle. Because we just don't know. Dr. Alan Turing showed that in his Machine Intelligence paper in 1950 ("Computing Machinery and Intelligence" in the British journal, Mind, October 1950, v. 59, no. 236, pp.433-460.
And it can be found online at http://cogprints.org/499/00/turing.html as well.
But it's a very curious happening, this confluence and mushrooming of "online-only" friends. In fact many people will refuse to ever meet in person their good and best virtual online friends with whom they correspond every day almost.
Now that's both odd and scary as a societal sub-model of behaviour.
Firstly, do we really know it is a person on the other side of the dialogue and not a computer program imitating a real person ?
Secondly, is the person, even if it is a real person, really the person they say they are. As a side issue, this happens a lot with imposters of celebrities on chat spaces. It's very easy to set up a page with someone else's picture and pretend to be them. Or so it would seem. Many people fall for it, too.
Now as was said, even if the person on the other side is real, although we know not how to ring them on the telephone or write to their home address, we wonder about the nature of the engagement between the two correspondents.
Unless we know the person in the flesh beforehand, and then correspond with them electronically, then all bets are off it would seem.
And the nature of unknown-to-unknown real person is a very odd and complicated one.
In fact, if one sits down to make a telephone call to his friend, or write a paper letter to his friend, it is a monolithic activity, so to speak. One is usually undisturbed by other whilst writing a paper letter or speaking on the phone.
But with online correspondence, especially fast messaging, and instant messengers, one is corresponding with possibly dozens of other online users at once.
Now this limits the scope of conversations usually. So one is forced to use a radio code to talk with someone else in the flurry of activity. Seeming hieroglyphics like "how r u", "c u l", "OMG", "ttyl", and the lexicon is much bigger, persevere over communication which is thought out and reflective. It's very much like channel surfing on a TV. It seems that people's attention span for a particular show is less than a minute at a time before jumping to another channel.
So we wind up with short, very limited in human transactional senses, conversations.
This makes for very new-fangled friendships -- if in fact they are friendships at all and not simple self-aggrandising, vain, and self-indulgent activities. This is an open question whose answer would seem to lean towards that conclusion, but by no means is certain.
But most online friendships, unless made real by an in-person communion, are very ethereal. And perhaps a hindrance to human relationships. Perhaps not.
One ponders if such an online talker really wants to know somebody, and all that that entails in everyday in-person relationships, or rather keep meaningful relationships at an arms length of the internet connection. Open question again. But it might be leaning that way, one opines.
If it all becomes superficial, and no one leaves their cubicle or apartment or house to meet people in person, we as a collective soul are in a bit of a pickle.
This reminds me of a seemingly prophetic 1995 movie called "The Net" wherein a person who is strictly in touch with the world by computer has lost her identity and can no longer prove who she is. That's a scary concept.
Are kisses and hugs and such emotions to be sent as the short-hand "*hug*" now ? Or if one would want to express emotion to someone else, they mail a file or diskette ? "*hug* is an electronic hug. It's not quite real. The fact is that it is becoming real and I don't really know fully what the implications of that are to our wired world.
The other bit about virtual friends, is that they can drop each other in a blink of an eye. That doesn't quite happen as frequently as that in real in-person life and friendships. So one could call such tenuous online friendships, a relationship of "pseudo-friends". Just like clicking a remote control to switch the TV channel at the slightest whim or fancy.
In 1967, a brilliant TV show appeared. It was "The Prisoner" with Patrick McGoohan. It was very sagacious. I saw it when it first aired and was blown away by its implications. Every one is a number. No one has a name. All interpersonal relationships are empty or shallow or faked. It is reminiscent of Nietzsche and his "last man" in his Thus Spake Zarathustra. They say they have found happiness and just simply blink blankly. Or the Soma in Huxley's Brave New World. Or Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" wherein people are not allowed to read anymore just watch television and interact with the screen. 451° Fahrenheit of course being the temperature at which paper burns totally. And wherein a fireman creates a fire to burn books rather than putting a fire out to save books.
This is a very important social issue. If we let it slip by without reflection, then we may wind up stranded from each other in person.
And marrying robots.
Some people these days, but a very few, like Kirkpatrick Sale have espoused Neo-Ludditism as a reply.
We might wish to find a bridge over the troubled waters of the side effects of the technological revolution that is in seeming un-stoppable progress.
We might also do well to remember that the day the electricity goes off, and the batteries die, leaving all our modern devices useless, that we still have to know things and people and remember how to get to their house, rather than relying on online maps and address lookups. Or how to boil potatoes.
There used to be a telephone company commercial decades ago with people singing and the slogan being "we're all connected". One perhaps didn't expect it to take this twist. It's not unfortunately what C.G. Jung wrote about, either, as far as I can reckon.
I wonder if we must re-read and get back to the works, concerns, observations, and predictions of Marshall McLuhan. The medium is the message.
Nevertheless, it's quite scary that we remember advertising jingles and slogans faster than a passage from Dickens. It's not unexpected. The psychology of consumer behaviour is a very intense field. And a financially rewarding one. But it might very well leave us all in the darkness of monotony, like Nietzsche's last men, reciting jingles and buying more toothpaste when we already have plenty of it.
So it goes.