Ethernet love, ethereal love, ephemeral love ....

I was browsing through other people's blogs the other day, and found one by Morpheus on blogging itself, and how to "succeed" at it. The post started off unsurprisingly enough by saying "Most popularly, 'winning' is about recognition, and measured by numbers. Hits, comments, links...," and then proceeded to list a number of ways one can increase traffic on one's own site. The important part, however, was the very end; this post concludes by saying, "But, right now, I'm happy with what I've got. If you like reading it, I'm happy too. But - and I apologise in advance for this - it's not the most important thing to me right now."

So naturally I started to wonder: what is the most important thing to me right now -- I mean, as far as blogging is concerned? What do I want to get out of my blog? Fame and fortune? Recognition for my pithy articulation and brilliant insight? The praise of adoring crowds and the love of beautiful women? Well, of course any of these would be immensely flattering, and I am sure my vanity would turn backflips for it all. (My vanity is pretty much the only part of me that is still limber enough to turn backflips these days.) But I think the reality would pall pretty quickly. Keeping up with all that would be a lot of work, and not really what I signed up for. It is true that back when I first created the blog and nobody had found it yet, I was pretty desperate to be noticed; only a long habit of talking to myself kept me at it until the day when I finally had other people to write for. But ultimately, if I think about it long and hard, I remember that the real reason I started this blog was in order to find a few people with whom I could discuss things that I really can't discuss at the office, or with the family over Thanksgiving dinner. If I find people with whom I can talk like this -- and I have -- then I have achieved my goal.

And of course, in the process of talking to these people and reading their blogs about their lives, we become friends. It is a special kind of friendship, of course. We never have each other over for dinner; we can never trade simple favors like babysitting; we don't even know each other's real names, for heaven's sake! But we know something about each other's lives; and while we can't discuss common friends or common problems at the office, and we generally don't discuss work or politics, nonetheless we do discuss things that are of critical importance in our lives that we can't talk about anywhere else. And that's important. It generates a kind of tender concern for each other. I know I find myself engaged in the stories other bloggers tell. When things go wrong for them, I try to think whether there is anything I have learned in my own experience which could help. By the same token, I am touched -- maybe unreasonably so -- when another blogger I care about asks after my well-being.

This line of musing would probably never have gone anywhere special, had it not intersected with another e-mail from Wife's friend D the other day. My e-correspondence with D has gotten quite extensive all of a sudden, ever since I started discussing with her some of the same things I've discussed here. (The news of Wife's affairs was no news, because D had long known about all the old ones. Wife even told her about Boyfriend 5 before I did. This is why I felt it was safe to talk with her.) Anyway, we were talking about Wife's romance with Boyfriend 5, and I tried to explain why I thought the whole thing is a lie start to finish. Part of my point is that he lies to Wife by telling her he lives in the Old Country when I am (at this point) quite certain he lives in the American Midwest. But I went farther than this, in the heat of rhetorical passion, and wrote:

" ... it saddens me that she feels so trapped that she has to find refuge in Fantasyland. And there is no way I can see the relationship with [Boyfriend 5] as anything else. EVEN IF I did not have reason to believe that he lives in [the Midwest] and not [the Old Country]; EVEN IF I did not conclude from this lie that he is callously and cold-bloodedly spinning this yarn to manipulate her for reasons of his own; I would STILL have to say that no relationship is real so long as it exists only via the Internet. Suppose (for the sake of argument) that every single word he has typed to her is sincere; he still can't show all of himself. Nobody can. We all filter what we type, even if only unconsciously. No-one can know what it is really like to live with someone else without actually doing it."

That was Monday. Tuesday, D replied in part:

"Let's start with your trenchant discussion about the fundamental fantasy of an enduring and genuine love between two people who have never met. Most of the time, if asked, I [would] disagree with your argument; I think written words are easily able to sustain a love relationship, and history will surely came to my aid here. People were separated for years, or never met at all, and yet they loved each other through letters and the power of words."

And of course she is right. What else, after all, is the blogging community if not a group of people who know each other only through the Internet (well, with a few exceptions like Coquette and Infidel, or Titus and Cate), and who share -- through their common concern for each other -- a kind of love? True, it is a specialized kind of love, and for the most part (again with a few exceptions -- some of the same ones, in fact) it is more philia than eros. But the basic point is that D is right, here, and I am wrong.

Now, I was trying to get at something substantive; what happened was that (as usual) I got carried away with my own words and overstated my point, thus missing the target. What I was trying to say is that when you know somebody purely through the Internet, there are petty irritations that get filtered out: fidgeting, nose picking, farting, bad habits, bad temper -- these are things that generally don't make their way over the ethernet. What you get at the far end, therefore, is less the person as he really is than the person as he would like to be (or as he would like to be seen).

In one sense this can be a good thing. If you want to communicate mind to mind, or soul to soul, it might actually be easier without all the other noise on the line. But you have to keep in mind at least three basic cautions:

1. Without the extra warning cues that we get from physical presence, an Internet acquaintance can go off the rails pretty easily. I have said it is easy for us to get engaged in the events of someone else's life, just by reading about it; this kind of quick intimacy might lead Blogger X to think himself on closer terms with Blogger Y than he really was, and to say or write something presumptuous or strongly unappreciated as a result.
2. If you really fall for someone on the Internet and decide you want to continue or extend the relationship in real life, you have to remember that all the stuff which has been edited out of the picture up till now suddenly applies. Whether it is fidgeting or farting or something a lot more unsavory, in real life you have to deal with the whole package, and not just the text version.
3. And of course, large-scale falsification is way easier on-line than it is in person, because you can say "I am writing you from the Antarctic" without having to procure even a single pair of winter boots as evidence. This is exactly the kind of falsification that I think Boyfriend 5 is practising on Wife. D writes in disbelief that, "Frankly, I cannot imagine deceiving anyone on the level you think is happening to [Wife]. Mentally, it's like walking into a plate glass window and watching it shatter; it's that kind of horror." I wish I thought she were right, of course. But we've been over all that before.

So where is the "Pithy Thoughtful Conclusion" button on this keyboard, anyway? How did I get this far into something and not know how I was going to end it? Can I just plead that it is late and I'm foggy? Does friendship allow me to presume so far?