What's even creepier about this....
What's even creepier about this is that I went to bed (and woke up) thinking...really...what is the fundamental difference between a "virtual" relationship, and "online" relationship, and a "real" relationship?
Truth is, much of our interaction with each other is imaginary. I have a relationship with the person I think you are. You have a relationship with the person you think I am. We put out an "image" into the world (or try to) that we want people to believe of us, on a conscious and unconscious level. We modify our behavior and our thoughts (can we say guilt, shame, embarassment, stage fright, makeup, hair dye, wrinkle cream) based on what we imagine other people are thinking, and they modify their expectation, deference, interest, and respect, based on what they imagine we are ('expert', 'porn star', 'lawyer', 'counter clerk', 'artist', 'cop', 'minister', 'grandmother', 'redhead', 'male/female/other').
I actually do have relationships with people I have only seen in 'real' time once or twice in my life, if ever. Some of them, I couldn't put a face or body to until YEARS after we 'met' in forums or chatrooms. I learned a lot about the judgments I make about people based on appearance that way. My friend didn't become less sharp-witted and funny when I learned that he was mousy, and shy, and a slow talker who found it hard to put words to his thoughts in person. In some ways, he was LESS real in person, where he could not articulate himself in all his brilliant wit and insight. Which version of him was "real"?
Today, there are significant 'real' people in my life that most of our best interaction occurs via keyboard, even though we are perfectly capable of getting together in person. There are others that we mostly keep in contact through reading about each other in places like this, until the (infrequent, and occasionally explosively energetic...or sometimes just comfortably companiable) times we get together. It's not that much different from telephone, and the handwritten letters of old, I suppose. It doesn't make my emotions for and about them less real. In fact, some of them have seen me more naked and raw and real than people who've known me my whole life.
And at the same time...the people I've interacted with on a daily basis and thought I 'knew'...some were kinky, some were criminal, some were quite crazy, some probably more sane than I realized. All were more, or less, than I imagined of them....things I learned over time, and often through media other than my personal experience of them. It's been my experience that people are actually freer with their truths in the relatively anonymous space of telephone, or the written word, than they are in person. Ever notice that your most significant conversations are often held in the dark, even in person? And then, I've had entire relationships blow up and end over things people THOUGHT they saw and heard, or believed I was thinking...when we were in the same room, having completely different experiences of the very same moment.
So as I try to articulate for myself the difference between a "real" relationship and a "virtual" one...I get really confused. Energy? I have significant energetic connections with people hundreds of miles away from me, and with people I've barely met...and barely existent ones with some people I see every day. Energy does not (fully) rely on proximity. The fact that I've confirmed the "reality" of your existence? Does it really matter that much whether you inhabit a body I can touch, or an avatar you made up to represent yourself? If I can have a conversation and relationship with a person who has had liposuction, breast implants, hair color and botox...or hell, for that matter, a complete gender makeover...why not a person who started from scratch and created themselves a digital body? If I can be stunned by the physical appearance of somebody I "thought" I knew from months or years of interaction with them...then how can that be the measure of how real they are?
I remember reading sci-fi as a pre-teen...Anne McCaffrey...about spaceships with souls. Real people selected, implanted into, and raised from birth as machines. It's not that far a jump from a ship with a soul, to the dysphoria many of us feel with the gender, age, size, shape and ability or disability of our bodies. Or for that matter, our lives. Anybody remember that kid who is/was the world's foremost expert on computer memory chips? Until the world found out he was 13 and freaked out? Was he more, or less real, before people projected his age over his intelligence and formed a different view of him? And it's not limited to the relative anonymity of the internet: I had FAMILY MEMBERS treat me differently, with more deference, after I became a lawyer than literally the week before...when I was still a retail jewelry clerk from a blue collar home. What changed about the reality of me in that week, that I had to gently ask a family friend old enough to be my grandfather to stop calling me "ma'am" because I was not more worthy of respect than he was?
I quit watching television because I was creeped out by my (and others') real emotional reactions and connection to fictional characters, how much I saw what happens on TV affecting what people believe, see, and do in real life...and how much of our "real" lives people are willing to sacrifice to sit in front of a fake life and stare...and then go to work and spend half their day discussing, AS IF IT WAS REAL AND MATTERS. Today I see life imitating television in every corner of my world...and no matter how low TV takes its imitation of life...reality does it one better and people sink there. Or perhaps they already were there. Our computers are TV 2.0, but they blur the lines between fiction and reality so much further by being so full of the real, as well.
As I accept that we exist and interact and emote on energetic levels separate from the physical, sensory reality of our bodies...and that all is not exactly as we see it...and I see "real" people blurring the lines between their "real" lives and their "virtual" ones...and more, and more, the fiction of what's been sold to me as "reality"....I find it harder and harder to decide what to call fiction and what to call real.
So I see real people and real police investigating real crimes partly in virtual worlds, and I see echos of fictional worlds in my mind...TRON, The Matrix...and I ponder the possibilities of the reality of my world based on the fictions that I've seen become real, and the 'realities' I've seen to be fictional...my mind boggles a bit. Sometimes it really does feel like I'm watching some weird glitch in the Matrix.
To quote a friend..."see, there really is no spoon."
Bah...I need breakfast.
Truth is, much of our interaction with each other is imaginary. I have a relationship with the person I think you are. You have a relationship with the person you think I am. We put out an "image" into the world (or try to) that we want people to believe of us, on a conscious and unconscious level. We modify our behavior and our thoughts (can we say guilt, shame, embarassment, stage fright, makeup, hair dye, wrinkle cream) based on what we imagine other people are thinking, and they modify their expectation, deference, interest, and respect, based on what they imagine we are ('expert', 'porn star', 'lawyer', 'counter clerk', 'artist', 'cop', 'minister', 'grandmother', 'redhead', 'male/female/other').
I actually do have relationships with people I have only seen in 'real' time once or twice in my life, if ever. Some of them, I couldn't put a face or body to until YEARS after we 'met' in forums or chatrooms. I learned a lot about the judgments I make about people based on appearance that way. My friend didn't become less sharp-witted and funny when I learned that he was mousy, and shy, and a slow talker who found it hard to put words to his thoughts in person. In some ways, he was LESS real in person, where he could not articulate himself in all his brilliant wit and insight. Which version of him was "real"?
Today, there are significant 'real' people in my life that most of our best interaction occurs via keyboard, even though we are perfectly capable of getting together in person. There are others that we mostly keep in contact through reading about each other in places like this, until the (infrequent, and occasionally explosively energetic...or sometimes just comfortably companiable) times we get together. It's not that much different from telephone, and the handwritten letters of old, I suppose. It doesn't make my emotions for and about them less real. In fact, some of them have seen me more naked and raw and real than people who've known me my whole life.
And at the same time...the people I've interacted with on a daily basis and thought I 'knew'...some were kinky, some were criminal, some were quite crazy, some probably more sane than I realized. All were more, or less, than I imagined of them....things I learned over time, and often through media other than my personal experience of them. It's been my experience that people are actually freer with their truths in the relatively anonymous space of telephone, or the written word, than they are in person. Ever notice that your most significant conversations are often held in the dark, even in person? And then, I've had entire relationships blow up and end over things people THOUGHT they saw and heard, or believed I was thinking...when we were in the same room, having completely different experiences of the very same moment.
So as I try to articulate for myself the difference between a "real" relationship and a "virtual" one...I get really confused. Energy? I have significant energetic connections with people hundreds of miles away from me, and with people I've barely met...and barely existent ones with some people I see every day. Energy does not (fully) rely on proximity. The fact that I've confirmed the "reality" of your existence? Does it really matter that much whether you inhabit a body I can touch, or an avatar you made up to represent yourself? If I can have a conversation and relationship with a person who has had liposuction, breast implants, hair color and botox...or hell, for that matter, a complete gender makeover...why not a person who started from scratch and created themselves a digital body? If I can be stunned by the physical appearance of somebody I "thought" I knew from months or years of interaction with them...then how can that be the measure of how real they are?
I remember reading sci-fi as a pre-teen...Anne McCaffrey...about spaceships with souls. Real people selected, implanted into, and raised from birth as machines. It's not that far a jump from a ship with a soul, to the dysphoria many of us feel with the gender, age, size, shape and ability or disability of our bodies. Or for that matter, our lives. Anybody remember that kid who is/was the world's foremost expert on computer memory chips? Until the world found out he was 13 and freaked out? Was he more, or less real, before people projected his age over his intelligence and formed a different view of him? And it's not limited to the relative anonymity of the internet: I had FAMILY MEMBERS treat me differently, with more deference, after I became a lawyer than literally the week before...when I was still a retail jewelry clerk from a blue collar home. What changed about the reality of me in that week, that I had to gently ask a family friend old enough to be my grandfather to stop calling me "ma'am" because I was not more worthy of respect than he was?
I quit watching television because I was creeped out by my (and others') real emotional reactions and connection to fictional characters, how much I saw what happens on TV affecting what people believe, see, and do in real life...and how much of our "real" lives people are willing to sacrifice to sit in front of a fake life and stare...and then go to work and spend half their day discussing, AS IF IT WAS REAL AND MATTERS. Today I see life imitating television in every corner of my world...and no matter how low TV takes its imitation of life...reality does it one better and people sink there. Or perhaps they already were there. Our computers are TV 2.0, but they blur the lines between fiction and reality so much further by being so full of the real, as well.
As I accept that we exist and interact and emote on energetic levels separate from the physical, sensory reality of our bodies...and that all is not exactly as we see it...and I see "real" people blurring the lines between their "real" lives and their "virtual" ones...and more, and more, the fiction of what's been sold to me as "reality"....I find it harder and harder to decide what to call fiction and what to call real.
So I see real people and real police investigating real crimes partly in virtual worlds, and I see echos of fictional worlds in my mind...TRON, The Matrix...and I ponder the possibilities of the reality of my world based on the fictions that I've seen become real, and the 'realities' I've seen to be fictional...my mind boggles a bit. Sometimes it really does feel like I'm watching some weird glitch in the Matrix.
To quote a friend..."see, there really is no spoon."
Bah...I need breakfast.