O
ne of my closest friends died not long ago. She was 30 years old, lived in Edmonton in Canada, had a wicked sense of humor, and a deft way of making everyone in a room feel welcomed and noticed.One of the keenest parts of my loss is that I'll never get to meet her. You see, Maur was an online friend. Although I spent more time with her than many of my 'body' friends, we communicated only via chat rooms on the Internet, and I hadn't had the chance to meet her in the flesh. Now I never will.
It's strange to lose someone you've never met physically. All I have of Maur are some digitized photos, a few saved history files of our chats together, some new clues on how to approach life, and some very dear memories.
I didn't learn about Maur's illness for some months. She kept it well hidden, until her keyboard lapses made it evident that something was seriously wrong. When she finally told me about her acute achalasia – a painful disease of the esophagus which was gradually killing her – I realized how important time online was to her sanity. To help while away the hours when she couldn't sleep at night we'd play word games, share stories about our lives, and go on virtual tours of the Internet, exploring favorite sites together.
When Maur made the decision to undergo risky surgery to try – yet again – to fix her esophagus, we spent the whole night before she was admitted together, chatting and playing, trying to get her through a period that scared us both. That was the last time we talked.
While I may have missed out on the chance to sit beside Maureen on her sofa and see her smile appear on her face, there's nothing that can diminish the depth of our friendship nor its solidity. I know, for some people, that is hard to accept. How can anyone feel so connected to someone they've never touched? How can you trust someone you've never seen?
Anyone who's had an online relationship will have heard these questions and others a little more blunt. People who haven't explored online connections tend to belittle them and regard them as pale imitations of 'real' relationships. We're all familiar with the long-standing image of the pallid, glasses-wearing, computer nerd who is so socially inept the only relationships he – and I mean he – can make are via the computer. That image seems to sum up the attitudes of many people towards online relationships and the people who 'need' them.
Even those who themselves engage in online chat sometimes take on board these attitudes and distinguish between virtual and 'real life' relationships, despite the evidence of their own experiences.
Given the newness of these types of relationships, this questioning is understandable. But in no way does it do online relationships the justice they deserve. Despite what you've heard about the dangers of the Internet – the pretence, the pornography, the pedophiles, the addictions – online relationships offer all of us something special.
Think about it: what distinguishes online relationships from offline? They're free from the limits of geography; they have an element of anonymity; and they usually come minus a whole raft of assumptions, prejudices and preconceptions we bring to our offline relationships.
For instance, it's not uncommon to have no knowledge of the gender, age, skin color, weight, physical attractiveness – whatever that is! – or physical disabilities of the person you meet online. Frequently, by the time you do get to discover all these things, you know the person so well that these details gain the insignificance they so richly deserve. What a liberation!
It's true, some people put on a front and pretend to be something they're not – that's one of the downsides of the anonymity. Sure, people make messes of online relationships. That's not surprising when you consider that it's a whole new area of social exploration, and those doing the exploring are, of course, fallible humans. And yes, people can and do hide important things about themselves online. Maur certainly did.
But if you compare offline relationships to online, you can't say one type is real and the other not. It's simply not true. They each have their advantages and their disadvantages. It's just that online relationships are a whole new area of human interaction, one that we're still sorting out.
If you think this issue doesn't affect you, think again. Something very profound is happening online and in the long run it will affect us all. Already there are millions of people who regularly chat online. By the year 2001, it's predicted that one billion people will be connected to the Internet worldwide. No matter what your level of knowledge or ignorance, the Internet is going to be a part of your future.
It's not something to be scared of; it's something to learn from. People are discovering new ways of getting to know one another. If online relationships offer the potential to expand dramatically who we consider community and who we include in our circle of friends, surely that's something worth fostering, and real enough for anyone.
© 1997, Rose Vines
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