Cyber cuddles - can you feel the real love?

If you are reading this now, it is likely that you are fully aware of the You’ve Got Mail-style relationships that are formed and fostered through a multitude of social networking programs. If you want you can email your rich uncle in Australia, IM your best friend from across the street to arrange a night out, or hold a raunchy video conference with a hot Brazilian from his shack in Rio’s favelas. The possibilities are almost endless, but the whole advancement of socialising via tele-technologies brings several questions into the stark light of your computer screen.

Studies show that 25%, on average, of the participants’ friends were ‘online only friends’ (UK). Most importantly, and interestingly, are these relationships ‘real’? To answer this we must look at the definition of ‘reality’ and consider whether or not online relationships embody it. A bloke called Michael Heim, who is ‘the philosopher of cyberspace’ and therefore pretty down with the meaning of reality, describes it as the actual. This means that the real is an object, an event, or an action that actually happens. However, our interpretation of the actual/real - that would be the way we perceive events and objects, and the thoughts in our heads - is the virtual. J.D. Scotus, another dude who is a bit of an expert on reality, “used the term virtual to bridge the gap between formally unified reality… and our messily diverse experiences”. So basically anything that exists regardless of the relations we assign to an object/event is real; the relations we assign to an object/event are virtual. For example, we are having sex with our Brazilian from the first paragraph. The act of sex is real. The meaning we assign to the act of sex is virtual; so we may decide that it means Mr. Brazilian is in love with us; we may decide that Mr. Brazilian finds us attractive; or we may think that Mr. Brazilian is just looking to get his dick wet by any means possible. Therefore, it is quite acceptable to conclude that face-to-face human relationships are just as virtual as online relationships - neither are not ‘real’ in the technical sense of the word. Relationships only exist due to the meaning we assign to them, as they are not actual entities - they are themselves virtual.

What I am primarily concerned with is whether or not being face-to-face is crucial in a relationship, and whether or not we should take relationships that are formed online as ‘seriously’ as those formed in the flesh.

My best friend has, what I would call, a sad obsession with the, at times, infamous online role-playing game, World of Warcraft. Most of her social life revolves around this game; some of her friends are solely online-friends, some are people who live near her who also play the game. For the most part there is nothing wrong with this - it’s just a hobby, right? The attraction of the internet, and games such as this, is the social interaction it allows. The problem I find is the fact that an online social experience is somewhat different to a face-to-face social experience - in fact an online relationship is a completely different kind of relationship altogether, which I believe shouldn’t be confused with or put in the same league as one that is face-to-face.

My best friend (same one) had a 2 year relationship with a guy from Sweden, whom she only met twice - both times towards the end of their relationship. It was so serious that he was afraid to let her come out with me because I’m a ‘bit of a girl’ and he thought I would lead her astray - he was probably right, but even so. Let her. My attitude was ‘he’s a random guy from Sweden who you’ve never met and you’re letting him control you in this way’. I would often ask her if she wanted to hang out, and the reply would often be “Ah sorry I can’t I’m ‘spending time’ with ****** tonight”, which constituted a video conference and sharing the latest comic YouTube videos. However, I am tempted to think that this guy didn’t live up to what she expected in person. He wasn’t as attractive in person as he was in photographs or on webcam (ah, the reliability of a lense!), he dressed oddly, and was unnaturally quiet. He didn’t have a screen to hide behind, and I’d like to draw upon this quite strongly.

On the internet you can more or less choose who you want to be. If I wanted to tell a reasonably believable lie, such as “my mum is an interior designer” (believable due to the amount of ‘feature walls’ in our house), I could quite easily get away with it assuming that the person I am lying to online has no or few mutual friends/acquaintances of mine, and has never seen my mum driving to work in her nurse uniform. I could even tell a considerably unbelievable lie and it would be likely that I would get away with it, such as that I’m an up-and-coming actress living the high life in LA, when really I’m an unemployed, student bum. I could tell my online-friends a different name, age, location, occupation, sex - and even claim photos of a barbie-doll groupie as my own. I don’t mean to say that everyone on the internet lies in this way, neither am I saying that it is impossible for a person to lie about such things in face-to-face circumstances, but it is certainly a lot easier for a person to alter their persona from the safety of cyberspace.

An online-friend may seem particularly chatty and easy to talk to. Online you don’t have to worry about ‘awkward silences’ that you may face in person. It’s quite easy to minimise an IM to Google a topic of interest before returning to your conversation with something to say, without seeming rude or boring in spite of your pause. Online you can make out you’re as popular and sociable as you like. You can log-off and say “I’m just going down the pub with my mates” and your correspondent is none the wiser that you’ve gone downstairs to watch an evening of soap operas on your own. Online you don’t have to worry about reaction. You can voice your controversial opinions - opinions you wouldn’t dream of stating in person - with ease and without having to face an aggressive confrontation. Equally, you have more control over what you say. It’s easy to start typing a sentence, read it back and think “Wait, I sound like an hormonal teenager“, and then hold down the backspace button on the top-right of your keyboard until you’ve deleted your potentially disastrous statement. However good it may be to have the opportunity to ‘take it back’, it is nonetheless untrue to the way a person would act in a face-to-face situation. Even though the consequences may be worse, it is better for a person to know you’re a dick than live under some illusion that you aren’t. Again, I’m not saying that this can’t happen in person - of course we hold ourselves back at times - but what I am trying to get at is you can present yourself as you wish via the internet, which is harder to do face-to-face, particularly if you’ve known a person for a while. It is for these reasons I believe that an online-relationship can rarely be continued in an offline-relationship: the person is different online to offline and as a result the relationship is different. I’m pretty sure this is what my friend found with her Swedish romance.

I must also admit to having an online-relationship at one point. I remember screaming with excitement when he’d booked his train ticket to come and visit me - I was 14, give me a break! I just couldn’t wait to look at his bluer than blue eyes whilst being held in his muscular arms - if Zack Efron had been around at the time I would have said he looked like him - he was a typical 14-year-old girl’s, pretty-boy fantasy. When he turned up at my door, it was quite a different story. His bluer than blue eyes were, in fact, that but one eye seemed to look a fraction off focal point, so he seemed ever so slightly cock-eyed. His muscular body was nothing like it was on webcam in the light that did it so much justice. He was actually really skinny and my mum constantly complained about how he needed feeding up! He also had very skinny lips, and whenever I kissed him he was sort of.. dribbley. It was as if he couldn’t keep the saliva in his mouth. Thank god I didn’t take our relationship as seriously as my best friend had hers! I hadn’t waited around for him, so I guess that eased the disappointment a bit. I still had another guy on the go who was, by all accounts, lovely. The point I am making is I romanticised a cock-eyed, dribbling anorexic into a first-class heartthrob. And it wasn’t just his looks that put me off. I had built up the hype of meeting him so much that it never quite lived up to my expectations. I had been talking to him online for over a year, and then went on to meet him about 5 times after that - it was never going to work. I saw him enough so it couldn’t be considered a totally online relationship, but I also saw him so little that it could hardly be considered a face-to-face relationship either. The boundaries had been blended, which is problematic because online the relationship was one way and face-to-face it was another.

Then there’s the whole ‘cheating’ thing. Can it be considered cheating if you have a face-to-face partner but pursue an online relationship at the same time, given they are completely different kinds of relationships? Of course it can. There is romantic intention behind it - I knew damn well I was cheating when I had an online relationship and a face-to-face relationship at the same time. It was so easy to juggle, and I think this is one of the reasons why the internet may endanger face-to-face relationships - but that’s another giggling quest?on, for another post.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with meeting a partner online. Nowadays one in 5 new relationships and one in 6 new marriages are between people who have met online. That’s 20% and 16.67% respectively, which is a lot on the grand scheme of things - it’s the third most popular way to meet a partner next to through work/school, and through friends and family. There’s obviously something appealing about it. I met my current boyfriend on Myspace - he was the first person to ever message me on there (let’s hear a big ‘aaaawww’!). We talked online on and off for just under a year - it was never a relationship, and it was never an everyday occurrence. We then met up and have been with each other since. The difference between my current relationship and my previous relationship to the cock-eyed, dribbling anorexic, however, is that my current relationship is based around face-to-face contact. Yes, we will talk online occasionally if we aren’t together, but I never consider talking to him online as ‘spending time’ with him. I know who he is in person, and have no illusions that can be created by the mystery and false representations of the internet - I know he’s an unreliable, pain in the arse, who actually does have an active social life, and who is a bloody good cook! I wouldn’t really know any of those things if we had an online relationship.

To conclude: I don’t think online relationships should be taken as seriously as face-to-face relationships because it’s like having a relationship with a ‘made-up’ person - a person who is the figment of your correspondent’s imagination. Ever heard a gangster say ‘Keep it real’? This is exactly what they mean.

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-evolution-of-dating-matchcom-and-chadwick-martin-bailey-behavioral-studies-uncover-a-fundamental-shift-in-how-people-meet-91608029.html Accessed: 05/06/10

http://www.tnsglobal.com/news/news-835B97242EAF4B648DFDC06F11038B71.aspx Accessed: 05/06/10

Dwyer, P., 2008, ‘Perception/Perceptual Realism’, The University of Chicago: Keywords Glossary [Online] Available at: http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/perception(2).htm Accessed: 30/03/10

Heim, M., 1993, ‘The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace’ (7), ‘The Essence of VR’(8), ‘Virtual Reality Check’ (9), ‘Useful Vocabulary for the Metaphysics of Virtual Reality’ in The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, Oxford University Press

Kalaga, W., 2003, ‘The Trouble with the Virtual’, Symploke, vol.11, nos. 1-2: ‘Theory Trouble’ Pp.96-103 [Online] Available at: http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk/searchFulltext.do?id=R01701265&divLevel=0&area=abell&forward=critref_ft Accessed: 12/03/10

Negroponte, N., 1993, ‘The DNA of Information’ (1) in Being Digital, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.