Pseudo friends, virtual friends, electronic friends
by Bob on March 6, 2007
This is a very complicated topic. Virtual friends, pseudo-friends, and electronic friends in the internet aether and not in real life.
I did not essentially plan on using MySpace (or any of its equivalents which I don't use but others do) to meet people, per se. I started off, pretty much, by having my little group of MySpace friends as people I know, mostly from the BBC in London and other from Boston. All cool. Of course, the first exception was Tom. Tom Anderson, the founder and inventor of MySpace, who is everybody's friend, and the biblical root of all other unintended strictly electronic friendships.
But what does it mean for life ? Are these people one meets on MySpace real ? One can hardly imagine. There are celebrity imposters, for sure. Someone just sets up an account and pretends to be someone famous. How could you tell if it was the real person or not ? That would be tantamount to answering the question posed by the brilliant English mathematician, the late Dr. Alan M. Turing, in his paper in 1950, entitled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence".. It is commonly called "The Turing Test".
It asked the profound question, how can you know if the thing on the other side of a computer screen is a person or a computer program acting as a person. Or as a modern corollary, if it is a person, is it the person you think it is and not an imposter ?
It turns out to be mostly if not totally impossible to tell.
The problem was based, of course, with leisure time in Cambridge, on the "Imitation Game" people played at parties. A man and a woman go into separate rooms, no one knows which one, they lock the doors, and the other party revellers are allowed to pass a note under the door with questions to determine which room has the woman and which has the man. It must have been a fun party game. It seems trivial. But it isn't. For, in this parlour game, the man and woman try to convince the party-goers that they are the other person. That's definitely non-trivial.
A great experiment which which I was familiar at the time was conducted by Professor Joe Weizenbaum at MIT in Massachusetts in the mid-1960s. He wrote a computer program called ELIZA to answer questions posed by humans as if they were talking with a Rogerian psychotherapist. Hardly anyone could tell if it wasn't a therapist. Weizenbaum used a combination of canned responses and re-phrasing the question to accomplish this. So a dialogue might go like this:
1. HUMAN: I feel lousy today.
2. COMPUTER: Really ?
3. HUMAN: Yes, I really do. I had an argument with my boyfriend.
4. COMPUTER: Do you often have an argument with your boyfriend ?
5. HUMAN: No, but when we do, it is really bad.
6. COMPUTER: Tell me more.
and so on ...
Well, as far as the computer program goes, statement #2 is a canned random response. #4 is a trivial re-phrasing adding no intelligence as we know it. And #6 is another random canned response.
A lot of MIT people thought they were communicating with a real therapist on their typewriter/teletype (pre-personal computer days).
Maybe that even tells us about the nature of one aspect of psychotherapy and analysis and theraputic sessions.
Of course, as a side, Weizenbaum named it ELIZA for Eliza Dolittle in the play "My Fair Lady" which was based on George Bernard Shaw's play "Pygmalion" wherein a linguistics professor transforms a Cockney-accented woman into a Queen's English speaking lady, almost mechanically. Shaw's allusion was based on the ancient Greek story of the sculptor Pygmalion who made a statue of a woman who came alive as his love and companion. Ovid recounts this in his Metamorphoses. Venus took pity and made the statue come to life. Of course. And they had children. Ah, witty Shaw was.
Now what about YOU ? One can never tell, except with a Deus ex Machina that YOU are YOU and YOU are real.
What this does is creates ignored havoc on a virtual friendspace such as MySpace. Even in email.
A friend of mine just had a year long relationship with a lady on MySpace. He said they were in love. I said, cautiously, cool. I asked if he had ever met the lady in person or spoken with her. He said no, only online. That worried me. But I kept my mouth shut for love's interest. So one day recently when he was supposed to go far away and hook up in person with her ... he told me it was all off. He said she wasn't quite the person she had said she was or something like that or got cold feet -- actually I didn't really enquire as I thought it impolite. Sad. It's all over. And they never ever met in person. Okay, stuff happens. But one is at a higher risk online one presumes. I mean it's not like in the Crocodile Dundee movie wherein as Mick meets more people at parties, some cross-dressers, where when he meets yet another odd-looking lady, gives a physical test. Can't do that online.
There are likely many success stories as well from MySpace.
So we have virtual electronic friends.
What about pseudo-friends ? Online friends who pretend to be what they are not and keep an arm's length to avoid exposure. That seems to be happening too.
Well, I wish it was like the ever-elusive old days. In the street, in person, and the like. It was difficult then with facades but more decisive.
One wonders if the technological impact on society can be reversed as the Neo-Luddites would prefer. Or if it's too late. Or even if it's desired or efficacious.
One, just as a human being, does not know anymore. One guesses that says it all.