In many years online, I’ve had the pleasure of seeing people form deep and lasting relationships with other people who they, theoretically at least, knew nothing about.
Like all relationships, they started out with meeting each other. Since it’s an online medium, that’s usually accomplished by answering or asking a question, responding to a post, or just plain replying when somebody says hello.
Also like all other relationships, these online ones progressed through entering discussions together, sharing thoughts, opinions and viewpoints, and finding common ground or mutual agreement (or disagreement) on a wide range of topics.
Online Encounters – Real Life Relationships
The online environment has a number of advantages when it comes to forming relationships. It gives you a chance to operate free of preconceived ideas or default value judgements. It lets you see the thought process first, and the person afterwards. It also has some drawbacks, but I’ll get to that soon enough.
Many of those relationships I’ve seen develop, and many of the ones I’ve developed myself, have burgeoned into genuine and lasting friendships. There are people all over the world who, though I may have once not known their real names, I wouldn’t hesitate to meet up with should I be in their country, or invite over if they should be in mine.
Some of those relationships have blossomed into even closer ones. More than one of the members on my favourite forum have upped stakes and moved across country to enter into more formal relationships with somebody they met there.
About those drawbacks…
Oh yeah…there are some drawbacks. And those drawbacks can make these growing digital relationships into something surprisingly fragile too. The biggest of course is the same one that plagues any kind of relationship. We can’t see into each other’s heads, so we can’t truly know each other. Everything can be kicking along just fine, when an ill-chosen word or a poorly phrased comment will have effects you couldn’t possibly foresee.
We sometimes have good cause to curse the detached nature of our communications on platforms like this, where the tone of a comment, the set of the head, the raised brow are invisible to our audience. But even more invisible are the thought processes that filter your comments through their perception.
Intent & Interpretation
Every effort in communication via text on this medium walks a tightrope between intent and interpretation. On the one side, firmly anchored, is how you meant what you said. You know how you meant it. On the other…the way that your audience interpreted it. Perhaps not as firm…perhaps a trifle uncertain in fact. Were you serious? Joking? Making a judgement? Insinuating something?
Between yawns the chasm of misunderstanding into which so many budding friendships fall, and bridging the gap in this slightly unwieldy metaphor, the words we’re using to communicate.
One of the things that drew me to writing was a deep love of poetry, instilled in me by my parents, and in them by theirs, luckily for me. Indeed, the first things I ever wrote were poems, and the only things I’ve ever written that have been published was poetry. I loved the facility of language, it’s ability to convey images and emotions.
Lots of words…
I knew that out there were the words that could communicate my thoughts, my ideas, my truths, if only I could find the right ones. Turned out not to be that easy, although I learned a hell of a lot of words along the way.
Because the meaning of words exists only in your head. They’re an abstract whose stability lasts only so long as they never enter the ears (or in this case eyes) of the person for who they are meant. It’s why the idea of the Platonic forms was so popular…that there was some perfect conceptualisation that everybody was just struggling to describe accurately. But there isn’t really. At best, there’s an amalgamation of common meaning that you can draw on, but never rely on.
And all of our relationships depend on communication. Makes you wonder how we survived if it’s so damned inefficient, doesn’t it? :D
The Law Of Unintended Consequences
All too often in our online explorations of other peoples points of view, we find ourselves treading in all innocence on the sensitivities, fears or discomfort of other people. Sure, there are times when it is malicious, but far more often these breakdowns in communication are just that.
In a world that is moving (hell, who am I kidding? It has moved) toward online connectivity, the successful development of any relationship depends largely on how well you can communicate with your audience, and how well they understand you. Something you laugh about may drive somebody else to rage or despair, and there’s no way of knowing until it happens.
As such, if you’re serious about communicating effectively, you have to be mindful of your audience, think about how what you say may be interpreted, and do your best to communicate your intent. And even then you’ll get it wrong sometimes.
The ties that digitally bind us to each other’s minds may be numerous, but they are fragile as well.
No Such Thing As Real Life
Everything we do and think and experience is part of our lives, whether it happens to our flesh or to our minds or to both. The very phrase “in real life” implies that the digital connection is somehow illusory, less important, less meaningful. But I think we are reaching a point, with so many people connected, that we’re starting to understand that it’s not true. Your personality and your identity are tied up in the image that you project, whether in person, or from thousands of kilometres away.
And the same is true of all the people that you meet. It’s not enough to be mindful of their interpretations as I mentioned earlier. We need to be mindful of their humanity. As a borderline solipsist, that’s sometimes a difficult thing for me, so it’s something I must consciously pay attention to. It’s all too easy to take the comment as the person, and build our assumptions based on that. In people, more than in any other thing, we find that which is greater than the sum of it’s parts.
It’s perfectly possible to build strong and lasting relationships with people online. And it works pretty much the way it does offline. Something we tend to forget as we insert a disconnect between the words that appear on the screen, and the unimaginable complexities that make up any (every) human being.
