On the unreality of on-line contacts

July 24th, 2008

We’ve always known that people on the other end of an email address are not like people on the other end of the phone. Not from their point of view but from ours. Perfectly nice people will turn into crazy abusive monsters while emailing and say things they’d never dream of face to face.
So it is with the structure of relationships as well when mediated by electrons ( or indeed increasingly by photons ). We structure them differently and everything seems to me done at a speed you’d never consider with a real person.
I don’t know if it’s the response time – you’d never see a new friend 40 times a week or have that many phone calls but it’s pretty trivial to do that by mail and not notice. How can we help nut get entangled faster than before.
I’d never subscribe to the theis that they’re not more real then the relationships we build in real life. I’m sure people said that of talking on the phone, then of the mobile. Forget that -those friends exist in every sense that’s real. But the tools and structures we built to mediate the friction between people are creaking and in danger of being lost. They got in the way but they gave us something as well. Be nice if we could capture that value.

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