The Internet People are Real
jr conlin is a human being. Or at least a bodiless intelligence that does a reasonable job at impersonating a human voice on the telephone.
JR does a better job than I of illustrating the cognitive dissonance of finally speaking to somebody you have ‘known’ for years as an Internet Buddy on the phone, and coming to the startling realization that all of these people that post on your forum and make comics and stories and such are, in fact, human beings that have families and eat and poop and so on.
In a converse way, it throws me back to when I was in church two weeks ago — yes, I go to church on Sundays, thank you, shut up — when the visiting minister polled the congregation on problems of the modern age. A fellow about my age, maybe a bit younger, stood up and railed against the Internet for a while as a place where nothing was as it seemed, populated by liars and cheats. I cornered him after the service and he sort of about-faced and recanted without me even pushing the issue, which took all the fun out of it.
All of this, though, plays into the way “community” is being redefined by the internet, and my questions about whether or not this is a Good Thing. See, the time was a few decades ago that your community was the folks that lived around you. Because you had no choice, right? You could use the telephone to keep in touch with others, and you could use the mail to sort of correspond, but you were pretty much shackled to your workmates and neighbours as far as daily living and personal relationships went.
The Internet, pesky bugger that it is, has gone and screwed all that up. Now, for the first time in history, people’s daily communities are skewing more towards intellectual peers and those that share their interest, and less towards the accidents of geography that surround them. And it’s radically changing the way we live.
I don’t think I’m overstating anything, either. And I don’t think it’s a bad thing, necessarily, but consider the fact that thirty years ago, I’d be hangin’ out at my house in 1974, probably talking to the neighbours or local pals. On warm summer nights I may well sit on the porch and strike up conversations with whomever happens past. Maybe fry up a few cicadas. Now, though, I’m inside, communing with the online comics community, or the science-fiction-fan community. I’m part of an online winemaking community, I participate in a weightlifting-for-newbies newsgroup, I have an interest in crayfish and minidiscs and am a member of some online “communities” dedicated to these things.
I like these communities. I like these people. I like my online friends and relationships. But a little part of me wonders where it’s all going, and what will happen when we have the liberty to spend practically ALL our time with the ‘easy’ communities rather than the brick-and-mortar communities around us.
I like ‘hanging out’ with the UH gang because we’re pretty alike. We have more or less the same interests, same temperment, same sense of humour. It’s a hell of a lot easier to spend time with JR and Steveo and JIM than to listen to my neighbour jabber about lawn care in a French accent I can barely wade through.
So there’s no question that the online community that shares my values, ideas, and interests is way more convenient and, in most ways, rewarding. But what’s happening to me as a cost for this convenience? The scope of ideas I am exposed to is narrower. The opinions I am exposed to tend to reflect mine to a greater extent
mine. Since like attracts like, finding “my” communities on the intermanet means a lot more time preachin’ to the choir and being a choirmember for other folks a’preachin’.
I have a feeling I’m getting a bit redundant here. But that’s where I’m at. Again, I’m not anti-Internet. I’m not anti-community. But talking on the phone with somebody I have known for years, taking human contact up one notch to voice, really drove home the point of how ephemeral and … uh … unphysical most of my friendships now are.
In an earlier blog post, JR was talking about how hard it was to think of somebody in driving range that he was close enough to to use as a medical-emergency reference. I think he’s ahead of the curve on this, but this is going to happen more and more as we can afford to make our closest associations with characters on a screen, ideas bereft of flesh, pixels in the ether that we hope there’s a person behind.