1 post tagged “friendship internet telepresence”
The more time I spend interacting with my fellow humans in the nodal time of cyberspace, the more I find myself wondering how the countless hours I spend viewing the world through the electronic lens of my computer screen is colonizing my personal and cultural head-space.
My monitor has become a kind of electro-magnetic relationship portal, overlaying its optical and auditory display onto my physical reality - replacing actions, conversations and journeys that would once have taken place in real-space and time, with a virtualized, decentralized, tele-present equivalent.
It occurs to me that many of my relationships now occur via software. Often with people I have only a tangential and ephemeral acquaintance with. These relationships lack a defined sense materiality and corporeality. In order to 'meet' my virtual friends, I never actually leave my home. I 'arrive' for a rendezvous, without taking any journey. There is no effort involved in my getting 'there'. Indeed, it is debatable that there is even a common 'there' between us at all. Our mutual references are electronic and psychic and our communication takes place inside a virtual construct. We get close, whilst simultaneously remaining at a vast distance. There is a kind of sensory shrinkage involved, with certain material components removed. In a very real sense the reality of our interaction is diminished, forced to fit its multi-dimensional geophysical complexity into the confines of my 17-inch LCD display.
I realize that I couldn't definitively identify many of my virtual colleagues by appearance. Their faces are blurred, behind the distorting lens of profile-photos that are often several years and several pounds lighter. I don't know where may of them live; beyond a generalized geographic location. In certain ways, I know more about the man in my local shop than I do about some of the people I call my friends online. Yet I am (supposedly) in a relationship of trust, one that implies attachment and an emotional bond.
It seems sometimes, that the additional freedom, to cross spatial boundaries, circumvent time differences and step through the electronic doorway of the screen into (apparently) limitless virtual space comes at a price. One where the information on my monitor and not the reality of the physical universe achieves primacy. Where I define my relationships with others through the surface of the screen and sacrifice the deeper slower reality of the material world, for speed and shimmer of the pixelated surface.
