Well now, what do you know.
At what point did the people I know online stop being “internet friends” and just become friends? I remember back in my BBS days (ahhh, technology nostalgia) everyone was clearly defined. These are my friends. These are my BBS friends. It was a different kind of friendship even, based more on talking about software than anything else.
Then I moved on to chat rooms on the big ol’ internet. This was still within some kind of limits and when I talked about the people I knew there it was still “oh, my internet friend Rantzay said…”. Then, TSO happened.
I don’t know if it’s the taking on of human form or simply more time spent with these people, but somewhere along the line I stopped saying things like “Oh, Lauren, my internet friend, said… ” and started saying “Oh, my friend Lauren was talking about…”. When I first realised I was doing this I thought “my word, that’s odd” but now it’s just - now it’s just people I know, and care about that happen to live a long way away.
I’m thinking about this because last night a friend of mine went into freefall and a group of us all got together to help catch her. This is not so unusual. Friend in crisis, we all went over to her house and offered our love and support. Except in this case, the house doesn’t actually exist in any 3D form, and the those of us that were there were in reality scattered over America and, in my case obviously Australia. And we all got together and sat around in her house and did anything and everything we could to help her.
There are limitations. There are times, when I speak to my friends all over the world, that people are in pain and I can’t do what I naturally want to do and sit with them and hug them and offer them that kind of face to face support, but I don’t feel any of the relationships are weaker because of this.
So, to my friends who I happened to meet online and who have become my Real Life friends - thanks. :)
May 20th, 2004 at 7:39 am
I too have wondered about this, why TSO feels different to IM chat, or even telephone chat, I guess. I have reached the conclusion that it is to do with the VR aspect of it - we humans are simple creatures, and given even the most crude visual depiction of a world, as long as it has a logical structure, and we appear to be able to move around and perform desired actions in it, our brains are happy to accept it as reality. At that point the distinction between ‘real’ people, and the ‘online’ people we encounter in this additional world becomes a bit blurred.
May 20th, 2004 at 10:37 am
Yes, that may explain it, although since that line blurred I decided it was probably better to just erase it all together.