{"id":5664,"date":"2015-03-06T08:25:17","date_gmt":"2015-03-06T15:25:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=5664"},"modified":"2015-03-06T08:28:40","modified_gmt":"2015-03-06T15:28:40","slug":"varieties-of-friendship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=5664","title":{"rendered":"Varieties of friendship"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"mailboxes\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I contributed<\/a> to the latest <\/em>New York Times “Room for Debate” discussion<\/a>, which posed this question: “Can real relationships be forged between people who never meet? Do online-only friendships count?” Here’s my reply, slightly expanded from what appeared in the <\/em>Times:<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cNo kinds of love,\u201d sang Lou Reed in his Velvet Underground days, \u201care better than others.\u201d There\u2019s wisdom as well as kindness in that line. Only the mean of spirit would seek to redline certain varieties of love or friendship \u2014 to claim that some human relationships \u201cdon\u2019t count.\u201d I have happy memories of exchanging letters with distant pen pals while in elementary school, and I recall with fondness the conversations I had with like-minded cyberians\u00a0in America Online chatrooms in the early nineties. Life is lonely; all connections have value.<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t mean that all connections are the same. If it\u2019s odious to dismiss online friendships as invalid, it\u2019s naive to pretend that there are no distinctions in quality between friendships forged in person and those conducted from afar. An epistolary friendship is different from a telephonic friendship, and an email friendship is different from a Facebook friendship. And all of those mediated, or disembodied, friendships are different from embodied friendships, the ones established between persons who are in close enough proximity to actually touch each other.<\/p>\n

The differences between virtual and embodied friendships come clearly into view at moments of transition, when an embodied friendship becomes a virtual one or vice versa. People who have built a friendship in person have little trouble continuing the friendship online when they\u2019re separated. The friendship may eventually peter out \u2014 absence doesn\u2019t always make the heart grow fonder \u2014 but the friends don\u2019t feel any anxiety about exchanging messages through their phones or laptops.<\/p>\n

Now think about what happens when people who have struck up friendships online finally get together in the physical world. The meetings are usually approached with nervousness and trepidation. Will we hit it off? Will we still like each other when we\u2019re sitting at a table together? Who is this person, anyway?<\/p>\n

The anxiety that virtual friends feel when they\u2019re about to meet in person is telling. It reveals the fragility, the sparseness, of disembodied relationships. It makes plain that we don\u2019t feel we really know another person\u00a0until we\u2019ve met him or her\u00a0in the flesh. Screen presence leaves a lot of room for fantasizing, for projecting the self into\u00a0the other; physical presence is more solid, more filled in \u2014 and, yes, more real. \u201cSome kinds of love are mistaken for vision,\u201d Reed sang in that same song. And some visions are mistaken for love.<\/p>\n

Photo by John<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I contributed to the latest New York Times “Room for Debate” discussion, which posed this question: “Can real relationships be forged between people who never meet? Do online-only friendships count?” Here’s my reply, slightly expanded from what appeared in the Times: \u201cNo kinds of love,\u201d sang Lou Reed in his Velvet Underground days, \u201care better […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5664"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5664\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5669,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5664\/revisions\/5669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}