A conversation among FTBers has (by a circuitous route, as is often the case) ended up in a discussion of the weirdness of the interpersonal dynamics of blogging – of the kinds and degrees of intimacy that can be created, and whether they’re an illusion or not.
I think the usual view is a brisk, “healthy,” matter of fact view that any sense of intimacy is an illusion, as is any sense of liking or friendship that may develop over time. That’s not my view. My view is pretty much the opposite, which is that it’s not an illusion at all, and that there are perfectly good reasons for this.
I was prompted to say some of this in the discussion after someone else mentioned that the person you see on a blog is not the whole person. That of course is true (ding ding! body missing! key ingredient of whole person!), but it’s also a little misleading. Yes of course you don’t get the whole person, but in a way you get a lot more of the person than you would in real life except in the most intense of relationships. In real life people don’t just sit around and listen to us blather on uninterrupted for two or three or ten minutes, but when we blog, they do. That too is not “whole” conversation; real conversation is full of interruptions and false starts, and laughter and gestures; but that’s just it – real conversation in real time in real life doesn’t allow for the kind of extended discussion you can have on a blog (or discussion board and the like).
This thought is probably more true for people who like to write and to whom it feels natural – but then so does blogging, I would think.
I would blather on uninterrupted more now but I have eleventy seven things to do so I have to go do them. Your turn to blather uninterrupted.
One-to-one vs. one-to-many does make a big difference, especially when the exposition is ongoing and the many are strangers to one.
(Long-term, in blogging veritas, if I may abuse a phrase)
I only know that I am grateful for the opportunity that bloggers provide to me to focus my thoughts and put them into words. I suppose it’s well enough in my head, but…
To me, the obvious truth is that no matter which medium of communication you’re using, you don’t get the “whole” picture. The whole picture of a person is an illusory concept. We all have so many sides; they all matter. There’s also major draft of anti-technology in the zeitgeist’s water supply that the opposing viewpoint you mention betrays. This notion that “old” ways are better, and new ways are worse. It is plain nonsense, of course; different media permit us to share different aspects of ourselves.
Things like email, message boards, instant messaging, and even SMS allow us, for example, to collect our thoughts, to research our points, to make sure–if we wish, or if we know to–that our facts are straight. This imparts for us an opportunity to say things we might not otherwise, to communicate ideas we might not otherwise, to go beyond our gut reactions.
On the other side, it permits our readers, or conversational partners, to absorb the information in different ways, to consider more carefully what we’ve said before responding. It helps to mitigate the effects of misunderstandings. It’s a similar advantage that Alan Moore pointed out that comics and prose have over films: it puts control in the hands of the “reader,” over the means by which and the speed at which they take in our words. It even, dare I say, gives them the chance to change their minds, or to formulate an opinion they did not have at all previously, before responding.
The “flipside,” of course, is that talking in person or over the phone, ‘live,’ gives us access to other information: body language, vocal ticks, gut reactions; it makes it harder to lie, or put on airs. Proponents of “that way is better” would probably refer to it as more “raw,” more “honest,” more “real,” but the truth is it’s all real; it’s just different real information coming through in different media. It all has value. Rather like the “gnu” and “accomodatoinist” approaches, come to that.
I really enjoy the long slow conversations of blog posts, where I’ve got time to turn an idea over in my mind, and think about it carefully, and see what others have to say about it, and add something of my own when I’m ready. I’ve come to know some people very well through blogs, even ‘though I’ve never met them in person. Only a few, of course, and those through blogs and e-mail and Facebook and Twitter. I meet them in a number of venues: they just all happen to be on-line.
And some people I just admire from afar, until finally something prompts me to comment…
John Morales (#1),
(Long-term, in blogging veritas, if I may abuse a phrase)
I’ll drink to that ….
Ken Pidcock (#2),
I only know that I am grateful for the opportunity that bloggers provide to me to focus my thoughts and put them into words.
Yes, I quite agree. Reminds me of an aphorism of Francis Bacon:
“Reading maketh a full man … writing an exact man.”
C. Mason Taylor (#3),
It all has value. Rather like the “gnu” and “accommodationist” approaches, come to that.
Not always, or even very often at this and related blogs/websites, a very popular position to be taking, but one I find that has some merit. Some theists, the less dogmatic ones, do seem to make some effort to at least consider the merits of opposing viewpoints. In which case it seems wise to make common cause, to some extent, with them against the fundamentalists.
Deborah (#4),
I really enjoy the long slow conversations of blog posts, where I’ve got time to turn an idea over in my mind, and think about it carefully, and see what others have to say about it, and add something of my own when I’m ready.
Likewise agree. Having the various comments, the printed words, in front of one allows one, I find anyway, to read and reread for the different nuances, to balance them against each other and to do a little bit of research to see whether they all “hang together” or not. Maybe it’s an embarrassment of riches but it seems that there is so much information available that the only way to manage it is to get various syntheses, “executive summaries”, from others – something that the printed word tends to excel at I think.
Love the Raymond Carver reference.
At least one blogger I have never met in person is someone I feel especially close to. I think that there is in a sense an illusory aspect to feelings of friendship if the relationship stays entirely within the confines of blogger-commenter or commenter-commenter.
If there is something worth calling a friendship, I think that there is a natural progression toward expanded media within that relationship. Several bloggers I know are on my Facebook, a medium I consider less formal. Others I have exchanged e-mail with.
The one person I think I can’t deny is an active and fulfilling friendship is a blogger whom I exchange e-mails with on a very regular basis, and have Skyped with. There are other bloggers I feel are friends of mine, some of whom blog at FtB.
I guess the question is what is the threshold for an “acquaintance” becoming a “friend”- and are we more aware or more sensitive to that distinction when we lack face to face contact. I feel closer to many of my online acquaintances than I do to any of my coworkers- or some of my friends in meatspace even.
I do sometimes wonder to what degree my investment in those online people is reciprocated, but I also wonder if I am more sensitive to this fact because I have less stimuli from which to make that judgement. It is equally likely that I invest more emotional energy in people I know “in real life” than they do I, or vice versa, and I am willfully ignorant of this because of an arrogant trust of my social instincts.
I guess that one could call online relationships illusory only inasmuch as they lack one important facet that in itself is no guarantee of reciprocity. I would argue that friendship is a relationship that transcends basic utility, and if your interactions serve that purpose- and given enough time mutually invested to draw a realistic conclusion about your relationship- then I think there is nothing “illusory” about online friendships any more than friendships in meatspace.
I blog on a regular basis, and have had more than one occasion when my wife of 17 years say to me, “I never knew that about you.” There is intimacy in the printed word that can not be matched in the spoken.
How childish.
You say what you say. “Teh internets”, as you may like to say, is not a fantasy land where nothing has consequences.
It’s a big, fuck-off phone.
I also think one might be overestimating how much “real, flesh-and-blood peoples” care about one. They generally do not, anymore than the happy-funtime internets phantoms.
All those people on the street? All those people outside your window? All of the fucks they give about you would fit comfortably in your pocket.
Uh…I think you misunderstood me, Svlad. The post isn’t about Me. It’s not saying something about how readers view Me. It’s about the nature of internet relationships in general. Granted, I did talk about it in terms of blogging, but that includes comments.
I hope you misunderstood me, at least. If not, that was a remarkably ill-natured comment.
Well, I can see why you thought that though (on quick re-reading). I do seem to be saying I blog and here’s how you-all react. I really didn’t mean that. It’s an example I’m familiar with, but I didn’t mean to make it the only example.
And as for the last bit – I know, I know – and furthermore, that’s how I like it. That’s why I was so amazed and annoyed last summer when some guy who lives half a mile from me revealed that he’d been keeping track of me because I walked past his house often. Ew!!
I think it’s perfectly possible to connect on a personal level with people on the internet. Several people I have met on Blogs have migrated to my Facebook account and consequently I know a lot more about them personally than just their views on whatever.
I’ve not met any of them personally but I would if the opportunity arose and I doubt I would like them any less as a result of doing so.
I think I see where the people who say you can’t get to know someone through a blog are coming from, but I wind in the same camp as Ophelia and several others on this thread. Still, the basic question deserves attention: why suppose you COULDN’T connect with someone through a blog? Let’s run a little thought-experiment.
Imagine two people talking – words, gestures, expressions, etc. Presumably, they are getting a great deal of information about each other. Studies have shown that we communicate a lot more non-verbally than we think. This might be the basis for the intuition that you can’t “really” get to know someone on a blog.
But now change the picture so that one of those people is paraplegic or afflicted with some other disease such that he or she cannot move or emote very much. The afflicted party can only communicate through a voice-synthesis device, much like Stephen Hawking. Now, I don’t think any of us would assume that whoever is talking to our imaginary afflicted party would be barred from getting to know him or her, even though the person in question can’t gesture, use body language, emote, or even provide inflection. In other words, even when one party is limited to providing only the same information that could be provided through text, we wouldn’t think we could not “get to know” the party in question, demonstrating that there’s no in principle reason to assume you can’t get to know someone through blogging.
So what’s fueling this intuition? Maybe that face-to-face conversation is freeform and two-way. Blogging is often thought of – and often practiced – as being formal and one-sided. A blogger has a topic (religion, cats, sweaters, whatever) and writes posts. Commenters comment, but – on many blogs – no genuine interaction takes place. Certainly it’s correct to think that you can’t really get to know someone from his or her carefully crafted thrice-weekly statements on cats.
But this assumes a lot of stuff that won’t always be the case. What if the blogger has a topic, but often strays from it to explore other aspects of his or her life? What if the topic is so central to his or her identity that to talk about that issue just is to talk about pretty much every aspect of his or her life, in due time? What if the blogger is less guarded in writing posts, writing more spontaneously? What if the blogger is active in the comment threads, engaging in back-and-forth with his or her readers? What if the blogger posts as often as several times a day, necessitating that readers are receiving a lot of information about his or her thoughts, almost as they occur?
To the extent that any or all of these are true, they will change the nature of the blogger/blog-reader interaction, bringing it closer to a genuine “real-life” conversation. I don’t know if the format allows that this interaction can ever be quite like a face-to-face conversation, but there’s no obvious reason why one could not get to know a blogger over the course of months or years of reading posts that are honest, unguarded, and frequent, especially when made by a blogger who gets involved in his or her own comment threads.
“What if the blogger is less guarded in writing posts, writing more spontaneously?”
I think that’s key. There are lots of variables of that kind that can change when Real Presence is not involved. Shyness; low boredom threshold; awkwardness; mind-blindness; lots of things.
I think the bottom line is that it’s not that one is incomplete while the other is complete; it’s that no one way of interacting with people is complete.
“…it’s that no one way of interacting with people is complete.”
Well said. This is why you have the blog and I do not.
Steersman, #7:
Definitely. Though I don’t really ever see many “gnus” with blogs saying we should never be nice or make common cause. I certainly see them mocking accomodationists, but only ever in retaliation for attempts at censorship. But I think with that debate, as with the main one for this posting of Ophelia’s, there’s a desire to own “common sense,” and to oversimplify human beings as all the same, and all reached the same way by the same approaches.
I know people who just hate the phone, just hate it, and will not communicate that way for more than a couple minutes for a utilitarian purpose, but who will happily read long-form prose writing. And I know people who hate reading large bits of text, the “tl;dr” crowd, who will happily engage in audio/in-person conversation for hours and hours.
I’m sorry, Ophelia. I thought I was agreeing with you! 😀
Apart from that, I’m still illnatured, though.
Svlad – oh! Sorry. :- )
I didn’t say you were, only that the comment was unless you misunderstood me, but I thought you misunderstood me, so it wasn’t. But it turns out I misunderstood you.
😛