Friendship Online

Lately I've been thinking about friendship, especially about friendship online. Just about everyone who's online has an opinion about online relationships, and I guess it's time for me to make mine known.

Where I'm coming from: I've been using e-mail since 1991. After eight years, several of my close friends are people I've met over e-mail. Most of them I've also met face-to-face, or I have plans to. I talk to them on the telephone and send them snail mail, but most of our interaction is online. Now most of my old friends have e-mail too, and I exchange mail with them from time to time although our primary interaction still takes place through more traditional channels. But today I'm talking about relationships that start online.

One of the good things about meeting people through e-mail is that you can usually find a community of like-minded people without too much difficulty. Say you're interested in some obscure activity or topic, like juggling hamsters or the mating rituals of marshmallow peeps. You could probably go through life without ever running into another person into the same thing. But run a search on AltaVista or DejaNews and you're likely to find a mailing list or a Usenet group on the topic. So you join the list or go to the newsgroup, and voila! You've found a peer group.

Now that doesn't mean that everyone in that group is the same, or even that they think the same thing about the topic that brought them together. But they're starting with some common ground in the form of a shared interest. Finding people who share a similar knowledge and vocabulary can feel very good, especially if you thought you were the only person in the world with that particular interest. And somewhere within that group are probably a few people you have more in common with than just that one thing. Those are the people you could end up becoming friends with.

Another appealing thing about making friends online is that a lot of the things that are threatening in real life (RL) aren't an issue. Concerns about appearance, about speaking in front of strangers, about shyness -- most of these fall away when you're meeting people through e-mail. E-mail is all about the words, the language, the way you represent yourself in writing.

In my experience, lots of shy people are more comfortable meeting people over e-mail than they are with face-to-face meetings, and I think one reason is that online they can communicate from the security of their own space. They're freed from the fear of getting tongue-tied in front of strangers. Often, this means they can express themselves in ways they don't in person -- they can make jokes, flirt, disagree with other people. In person, these people might not say a word; in e-mail or chat, they feel safer and their fear of interaction with other people drops away.

Although I'm not the shyest person, I've always liked communicating through writing. Long before e-mail was a household word, I maintained friendships with several people through the mail. I'd send off a letter and watch for one in return; many of my friendships developed that way, over years. Because I loved writing snail mail and receiving it, I developed a love-hate relationship with the U.S. Post Office that continues to this day. (If you want the gory details, just ask.) But relationships that grow through correspondence are nothing new -- they've been happening for hundreds of years.

I think it's the immediacy of e-mail makes online relationships very different. Not only because of the speed of the communication, which means you can send a significant volley of messages back and forth in a day, but also the speed of the relationships themselves. Online, in a matter of weeks you can cover ground that used to take months or even years by snail mail. That can be a good thing or a bad thing, but overall I'd say relationships that develop too fast aren't always built to last. Especially if they never progress past the e-mail screen.

Some of the things that can make online relationships good are also the things that can make them bad. Of course there's the obvious: having the freedom to represent yourself solely in writing allows unscrupulous people to misrepresent themselves. I'm sure we're all familiar with the stereotype of the twelve-year-old boy on IRC, pretending to be a grown woman, flirting with a "man" who is actually a twelve-year-old girl.

But I think most situations are more complex than the stereotype. We all like having the opportunity to re-vision ourselves, and e-mail is the perfect medium for that. I don't think most people set out to deceive others online; I think most misrepresentation comes from people taking truths they dislike about themselves -- character traits, unpleasant situations, emotional or physical limitations -- and writing those truths out of their own story. Everything they say might be true, but they also might be leaving out some important details. And in the absence of the clues that come with face-to-face interaction, you get a fairly narrow view of who someone is. Without those clues, it's also easier to misunderstand each other.

What I mean is that online relationships can be based on only a fraction of the whole picture. While any relationship is like that to some degree (after all, who really knows everything about another person, and who'd really want to?), online I think this happens even more. In an online relationship, the mundanity of day-to-day existence can seem distant and removed. People can be intensely involved through e-mail, yet never have mentioned the relationship to their respective spouses or offline friends. In fact, even if you tell them, spouses and offline friends sometimes respond as if you're talking about an imaginary friend -- after all, they say, how do you know this person really is who she says she is?

Well, I tend to trust people, but I guess that's a legitimate question. When you receive a letter in the mail from someone you've never met, it's different from e-mail. After all, you've got the physical letter that proves someone exists -- you've got handwriting or typing, and at the least a postmark. The letter comes from the post office, passes through the letter carrier's hands and into your mailbox. You can see it.

E-mail is ephemeral. It comes through the wire, untouched by human hands. It feels like something separate from physical life. It can be a connection with someone far away, but it can also be an escape. And escape is very compelling.

I feel very grateful for the friendship and emotional support that people I've met online have given me. I feel lucky to have met so many good friends through this medium. But I like it best when my e-mail relationships cross over into RL, because it takes an effort on both our parts, and that effort signifies a commitment to the relationship. I like it when we start mailing things to each other, when we talk on the phone and visit. That helps me to bring those relationships into my everyday life, and I think it gives both of us a better understanding of who the other person is.

I need a balance. I want Marty to know about the people who are important to me online, and I want them to know about him. I like to introduce my friends from e-mail to my other friends when I have the opportunity, so that my life feels connected, cohesive, rather than compartmentalized into online/offline categories. For the same reason, I enjoy visiting my online friends and meeting their friends. I also like it when friends I met offline visit my Web site and see how I present myself here. I don't feel like I have anything to hide, between my online and offline personae, and I like it that way.